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VOLUME 107, ISSUE 8 919 530.7116/CAMPUSECHO@NCCU.EDU WWW.CAMPUSECHO.COM
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Sports
Opinions
A&E
Feature
NCCU men’s basketball takes down Morgan State for 31st straight win
Melquan says: Accepting your errors allows you to live a pure, true life
“Never Sold Drugs:” Duo seeks to uplift through clothing brand
Forward together, not a step back: HkonJ returns to Raleigh
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Campus Echo
BILLINGSLEY BRINGS BAGGAGE TO NCCU Complaint against Prairie View A&M follows VC of student affairs; 2 NCCU student affairs employees fired BY ALEXANDRIA SAMPSON ECHO ASSISTANT EDITOR
A pending legal complaint from Prairie View A&M University has followed Miron Billingsley, vice chancellor of student affairs, who came to N.C. Central University in September 2014. The Echo learned of the case in September, when
reporters came across it during a routine Google search for a profile of Billingsley (“Eagles Welcome Billingsley,” Oct. 1, 2014). Chondra Johnson, former director of recreation sports at Prairie View, filed a complaint against Prairie View in 2013 that alleged sex discrimination, harassment and retaliation in violation of Title VII.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. At the center of the complaint is Billingsley. Johnson was hired at PVAMU on Jan. 1, 2011. According to the document, she was sexually pursued by Dean of Engineering
Kendall Harris, a married man and, according to the complaint, Billingsley’s “best friend.” When Johnson rejected Harris, Johnson alleges that Billingsley “became increasingly hostile towards Plaintiff Johnson” over the two years she worked at the college. “Billingsley subjected Plaintiff to multiple acts of
Designing for community NCCU showcases work of internationally acclaimed Freelon Group
gender-based harassment, retaliation, hostile work environment, unprofessionalism and discriminative communications and actions,” the complaint reads. For instance, the complaint states, Billingsley asked his supervisor, Lauretta Byars, vice president of student affairs and institutional advancement,
LOS ANGELES TIMES (TNS)
PHOTO COURTESY
BY JAMAR NEGRON ECHO EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
If you’ve ever been in the Biomedical/Biotechnology Research Institute (BBRI) or the Biomanufacturing
OF
Research Institute and Technology Enterprise Facility (the BRITE Building), then you’re more acquainted with Phil Freelon and the Freelon Group than you think. Now
NCCU ART MUSEUM
you can know even more. Samples of the extensive body of work of Freelon Group Architects has set up shop in N.C. Central University’s art museum. The exhibit features proj-
ects from the firm’s cultural, civic and collegiate clients. Freelon founded The Freelon Group Architects in 1990 in Durham. Since its
n See FREELON Page 8
Parents struggle to afford day care Despite state vouchers, campus day care, student parents excluded BY CHANEL NORMAN ECHO STAFF REPORTER
At McClure Early Childhood Center in Tulsa, Okla., Iniyah Quitto, 4, is dropped off by her dad, Jeremiah, on Sept. 12, 2014. McClure's pre-K program is run by a community agency open only to children living below the poverty line. Tulsa’s school district offers fully covered preschool MIKE SIEGEL/Seattle Times (MCT)
Ask any college student parent how things are going and you’ll discover that she or he is struggling, day in and day out. And one of the biggest challenges student parents face is access to affordable child care. According to recent fact sheets and studies by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), some 4.8 million college students are raising children. Of these, about 1.1 million attend public and private nonprofit institutions. Just over 57 percent of these student parents are categorized as low income. Women make up 71 percent of all student parents. Just over 61 percent of
student parents work 30 hours or more per week. That’s in addition to the more than 30 hours per week that approximately 56 percent of single parents spend on dependent care. For most, the workload, financial burden and stress are just too much. Student parents are three times more likely to drop out of college than other students. And 53 percent of student parents leave college after six years without their degrees. This issue affects African Americans particularly hard. Thirty-seven percent of AfricanAmerican students at all community, for-profit and not-for-profit colleges have one or more dependent children. The rate is 25 percent for Latinos, and 20
n See CHILDCARE Page 6
n See BILLINGSLEY Page 2
Scientists push for planetcooling tech BY RALPH VARTABEDIAN & EVAN HALPER
One of the most well-known black architects of Durham, Phil Freelon and his group of architects, The Freelon Group, have designed cultural, civic and collegiate buildings like the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts+Culture, featured above.
that Johnson be terminated because “she disrespected him by taking personal days off to attend training.” Byars denied the request. The complaint also alleges that Billingsley "sadistically commented throughout to Plaintiff Johnson that he noticed her weight fluctuated and she
WASHINGTON – Proposals to cool down the Earth’s climate with high-risk chemical or mechanical technologies have been largely dismissed in the debate over global warming, but a panel of the nation’s top scientists say the time has come to significantly increase research efforts and prepare to step in should there be a climate catastrophe. The most exhaustive U.S. examination of direct intervention in the Earth’s climate was released Tuesday by the National Research Council in two reports that assessed the significant costs and risks of such ideas as removing carbon dioxide from the air with massive machines, fertilizing the oceans to increase plant activity, chemically modifying the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back to space and a wide range of other ideas. “Let’s hope it never happens, but if we ever have our back against the wall we will know ahead of time what we need to do,” said Marcia McNutt, chair of the committee and editor in chief of Science magazine. “There are no silver bullets for the current climate situation that comes from any kind of climate intervention. We agree with the majority of people that these are not solutions that we want to turn to.” Indeed, McNutt and a large group of the nation’s
top academic scientists who wrote the reports said the best approach to the problem of global warming continues to be reductions of greenhouse gases. The lack of progress for more than two decades, however, makes it “increasingly likely that as a society we will need to deploy” some forms of the leastrisky technologies to reduce the Earth’s temperature, they said. The scientists acknowledge that developing risky tools to counteract global warming carries a “moral hazard,” in which nations may become even less motivated than they are now to take immediate steps to combat climate change. But not having the tools in hand might also result in future actions without adequate scientific research. “People are going to read these reports and they are going to be very scared about the future,” McNutt said. The research council’s work was divided into two lengthy reports, one that assessed a very high cost and relatively low-risk approach of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Isolating carbon dioxide at power plants and injecting it into deep wells remains expensive and unproven at the scale that would be necessary to have a big impact, the report said. Even seemingly benign ideas like reforesting large
n See CLIMATE Page 7
Rising seas probably played a role in the erosion gnawing at much of the East Coast over the past century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says. As the seas start to rise faster, it warns, erosion will only get worse. JOHN D. SIMMONS/Charlotte Observer (MCT)