The University of California, Davis paid at least $175,000 to consultants including a Towson firm to clean up its image online after students and alumni were pepper-sprayed by campus police during an otherwise peaceful protest in 2011.

Documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee show the university worked with Nevins & Associates and other firms to clean up its own image and that of Chancellor Linda Katehi.

UC Davis worked with Nevins & Associates on a six-month contract that paid $15,000 a month, according to a copy of the contract. That contract was signed in January 2013, just a few months after the University of California regents agreed to pay a settlement to 21 students and alumni who sued the university.

The company, located on West Road in Towson, did not respond to a request for comment Friday. President and founder David Nevins is a former chairman of the Board of Regents for the University System of Maryland.

The Baltimore Sun has used Nevins & Associates on a contract basis for public relations needs, Baltimore Sun Media Group spokeswoman Renee Mutchnik said.

As part of its contract, Nevins & Associates said it would work to remedy the “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor” through the “strategic placement of online content.”

The November 2011 incident, captured in videos that went viral on the Internet, showed an officer spraying students seated at an Occupy rally directly in their faces at close range. At the time, the Occupy Wall Street movement had spilled onto college campuses and combined with student anger over rising tuition and cuts to higher education to spur protests and sit-ins.

Nevins & Associates agreed to launch an aggressive and comprehensive online campaign to eliminate negative search results through modifications to “existing and future content” and by creating more original content as needed.

One means of doing this, the company said, was by diluting negative viral content with a surge of positive stories on different topics. The company also suggested UC Davis adopt Google platforms to “expedite the eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Jessica Anderson and Tribune Newspapers reporter Ruben Vives contributed to this article.

—?Sarah Parvini, Tribune Newspapers