Details, Denice Denton
So far, the most aggressive paper on the Denice Denton story has been the Mercury News, which reports this morning that Denton’s recent two-week absence from campus was part of an already established pattern that began almost as soon as she made the now clearly catastrophic decision to take the Santa Cruz job:
Campus sources said the chancellor had disappeared from campus three times since arriving in February 2005, and had skipped official events with such regularity that they were not surprised when she didn't show up at commencement exercises earlier this month.
The first incident was about two weeks into her turbulent tenure, when Denton called her assistant in a panic from Yosemite National Park and said she couldn't get home.
A University of California official confirmed that Denton visited Yosemite after a trip to Sacramento and that someone was sent to the national park to help her. The source said the chancellor "had a reaction to medication she was or wasn't on," and it was so debilitating that it was unsafe for her to drive back alone.
Campus spokeswoman Liz Irwin said she knew nothing about the Yosemite incident.
However, she said the chancellor's mother, Carolyn Mabee, had authorized her to say that Denton had been treated that month for "an acute thyroid condition."
Denton's next extended absence occurred in November and December, when she disappeared for several weeks, the sources said. Campus officials trying to reach her were never given an explanation for the absence.
Denton's mother said Monday, through Irwin, that her daughter had a benign ovarian cyst removed in November and "was away for the surgery and the recovery period."
Denton had retreated from campus life in the weeks before her death, penciling out appointments and clearing her calendar. She began a medical leave on June 15; Irwin would not disclose why. Few people knew about this last leave until her apparent suicide on Saturday.
Irwin said Denton's medical leaves were not publicly announced at the time "because most people think of medical conditions as confidential. The people needing to know did know."
So she’s been in the job for not much more than a year, and she’s been absent for three significant stretches, the first of them (which occurred before a lot of the shit people cite in her collapse hit the fan) bizarre. The two others are lengthy and unexplained -- after the fact, her poor mother has cobbled together some illnesses and conditions for her which either should not have been as debilitating as the absences and behaviors suggest, or, if they were that debilitating, should have caused Denton to withdraw from the job, at least temporarily.
When I put this information together with the fact that Denton felt she needed guards when on campus (and in any case seems to have spent most of her time at her lover’s place in San Francisco), I come up with a tentative diagnosis of paranoia.
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