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@thepittnews
Vol. 105Issue 92
Wednesday, January 14, 2015Pittnews.com
Chris Lungred, of Iron City Bikes on South Bouquet Street, works on a mountain bike. Colin van’t Veld | Staff Photographer
GEARED UP
A inauguration ceremony preceded the meeting. Jeff Ahearn | Assistant Visual Editor
As the years roll by, Pittsburgh’s rates of diversity and racial disparity stand still.
Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems released “Pittsburgh’s Ra-cial Demographics 2015: Di! erences and Disparities” on Tuesday, a follow-up of the Center’s 2007 report. The report compares the most recent sta-tistics from the city of Pittsburgh, Al-legheny County, the Pittsburgh metro area and the nation, to assess quality
of life based on race. The study found extreme racial disparities in the Pitts-burgh area, and also marked that there has been little to no social progress in Pittsburgh since 2007.
The report states that roughly one third of black people, one quarter of Hispanic people and one fi fth of Asian people within the city of Pittsburgh live in poverty, compared to 15 per-cent of impoverished white people. These numbers are similar to the 2007 report, which found changes of less
than one percent in black and Hispanic poverty levels, and that 30.4 percent of Asian people live in poverty in Pitts-burgh. According to the 2007 report, 14.3 percent of white people lived in poverty.
The report also found that minori-ties, particularly black citizens, are se-verely disadvantaged in Pittsburgh in the social areas of education, criminal justice, health and economics.
Report shows racial disparity persists in Pittsburgh
Lauren Wilson Staff Writer
At their fi rst meeting together, the Student Government Board worked quickly and appointed two Board members to new positions during the Board’s 20-minute debut.
In two separate unanimous votes, the Board appointed Board member Matt Sykes as vice president and chief of fi nance, and Natalie Dall as vice president and chief of Cabinet.
The previous Student Government Board, whose term ended on the fi rst day of the spring semester, created the positions.
As vice president and chief of fi nance, Sykes will be in charge of increasing SGB’s transparency, specifi cally regarding the Stu-dent Activity Fund and how SGB allocates the money in the fund.
“We want to have more of an open-door policy,” Sykes said. “If students have questions or complaints, they can come to me and we can work it out.”
Dall, in her new role as vice president and chief of Cabinet, will give weekly reports on the progress of the Student Govern-ment committees.
Dall said the new committee chairs will still make weekly reports, but Dall added that she’ll take on “the liaison role”
In it for the long haulIncoming Board holds fi rst public
meeting Emily Ahlin Staff Writer
SGB 2
Diversity 2
2 January 14, 2015 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
between the Board and the committees. The Board members also expressed how
excited they are to start working together on their initiatives.
The Board spent last weekend, Jan. 9 to Jan. 11, at the yearly SGB retreat. Board mem-ber Nasreen Harun said the Board members discussed initiatives, reviewed the SGB Gov-erning Code and performed team-building exercises.
“It was a great retreat this weekend,” Ha-run said. “We’re all getting back into the swing of things.”
In other ActionThe Board proposed grammatical and
formatting changes to improve clarity in the SGB Governing Code. They will vote on the changes at next week’s public meeting.
AllocationsPantheRaas requested $2,154.06 to send
20 people to a competition in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Board approved in full in line with the allocations recommendation.
SGBFROM PAGE 1
Larry E. Davis, dean of Pitt’s School of Social Work and director of the CRSP, Ralph Bangs, associate director of the CRSP and Sarah Berg, coordinator for the CRSP, pre-sented a summary of the report at the School of Social Work on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.
Data collected in the economic demo-graphic report showed that, in Pittsburgh, a black household’s median income is less than half of a white household’s income.
Of areas with more than one million resi-dents, Pittsburgh currently has the whitest metropolitan area in the nation. The popu-lation diversity section of the report shows that Hispanic people are least represented in the area, comprising of only two percent of the city’s population, which contrasts the growing population of Hispanics on a national level.
Bangs, who also worked on the 2007 re-port, said, “A major fi nding is that economic and educational conditions continue to be among our most serious problems in this region.”
A variety of factors cause these racial disparities.
Bangs said that Pittsburgh’s racial dis-parities in homeownership stem from racial discrimination in the housing market and high poverty rates that leave black citizens at an economic disadvantage. In Pittsburgh, only a third of black individuals own a home, compared to almost two-thirds of the white population.
Segregation between the black and white communities is also still an issue. The average white student in the Pittsburgh area attends a school where 90 percent of students are white and most students are not poor. At the same time, the average black student attends a school where fi fty percent of students are black and the majority of students are poor. Minority students also have less knowledge in math and reading than white students, according to test scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment in 2012.
Davis said, with these fi ndings, policy makers can use information in the report to improve the quality of life for minorities in Pittsburgh.
Mayor Bill Peduto attended the confer-ence and thanked the center for gathering
the report. Peduto said the fi ndings will be “the baseline for all discussion.”
Following the conference, Davis said to reduce racial disparities in criminal justice, society should question the country’s stag-gering incarceration rate, including the war on drugs. He also recommended a more di-verse police force, and said the introduction of more opportunities for people in poor communities would reduce injustice.
In the wake of the report and the events in Ferguson, Mo., Pitt’s Black Action Society is focused on immediate changes in racial disparities and injustice within the criminal justice system.
Executive Secretary Dejah Stewart said the Black Action Society is hosting a town hall meeting with a police panel this Friday. The panel will give people a chance to understand their rights and build a better relationship between students and police in Pittsburgh.
“People want to avoid [racial discrimina-tion], they don’t want to acknowledge it’s an issue,” Stewart said. “But it is, especially with Ferguson and the facts presented from this report.”
DIVERSITYFROM PAGE 1
3January 14, 2015 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
OPINIONSExamining Obama!s
community college plan
EDITORIALEDITORIAL
Free things are great, right? Well, at least, they seem so at face value.
President Obama’s recently an-nounced “America’s College Promise” proposes two free years of community college for American students . It ap-pears to be a step in the right direction of realizing greater higher education opportunities. The plan is based o! of the “Tennessee Promise,” a state schol-arship program, which begins this fall. The program guarantees free tuition to Tennessee community and technical colleges. But before the public gives the plan too much praise, we must ex-plore both the positive and negative aspects of it.
We’ll start with the bad news. Although the program is free to stu-dents, someone still has to front the bill. According to The Christian Science Monitor, “America’s College Promise” is estimated to cost the federal govern-ment $60 billion over 10 years. Is it worth the cost?
Although more education sounds exciting to those who value the impor-tance of learning, will the federal gov-ernment spending billions of dollars on this program really equate to more job opportunities for students?
Additionally, should the federal government play such a large role in post-secondary education, or should those choices be reserved mostly for the states?
There are no simple answers to these questions. However, when con-sidering the President’s proposal, stu-dents and citizens should not ignore these questions, but they should discuss them in more detail than possible here.
That aside, there are certainly posi-tives to the initiative. Many studies have confi rmed that higher levels of education correlate with higher levels
of economic earnings. Many students from poor or working class families do not have the means to obtain a high level of education. With “America’s Col-lege Promise,” participating colleges would o! er academic programs that fully transfer to four-year colleges or job training programs.
Governments cannot and should not strive for equal results in any fi eld, including education. That is not in ac-cord with our individualistic society. However, governments should always work to provide equal opportunity to students and citizens so that they have a chance at success. If the government, whether at state or federal level, can o! er students better access to higher levels of education, which is the goal here, the American public should strive to make the idea a reality.
But the program should not stop at community colleges. Today, jobs requiring trained, vocational skills re-main essential to society. If the federal government invests signifi cant money in educational opportunity and wants a practical return on such an investment, it should create more scholarships for low to middle income students to learn a trade needed in the job market, such as welding. That way, money spent on education directly leads to employment and, therefore, to economic growth.
President Obama’s proposal sounds great, and perhaps it will turn out to be . But we cannot ignore the fi nancial reali-ties of such programs or whether or not the federal government can e! ectively execute its promises. Nonetheless, we should not forget the positive aims of the program. With caution and ongo-ing scrutiny, Americans should work together to provide higher education and skills training to all Americans, re-gardless of socioeconomic background.
TNS
As we settle into 2015, major lawsuits are already pending. From Congress suing the Presi-dent over Obamacare to another alleged sexual assault lawsuit against comedy icon Bill Cosby, the world is getting better one ruling at a time. However, while you might hear about high pro-fi le cases the most, it is a civil lawsuit, one of the estimated 15 million per year, that is the true hero. For one, without concerned citizens, like the Idaho inmates who sued eight brewers for fail-ing to warn them of the e! ects of alcohol and inducing their lives of crime, where would all of our lawyers work? Where would they fi nd their signifi cance? The United States would have even more J.D. holders without actual law positions than the 43.8 per-cent that the group Law School Transparency calculated for the
class of 2012 . It would also be tragic if people like the gentle-men who sued Subway for not actually having “foot-long” sandwiches suddenly found less things to sue about. This may cause the unthinkable: more unemployed lawyers. To start, only 84.5 percent of 2013 law school graduates were employed at all, according to a report by the National Association for Law Placement. Law students couldn’t possibly stoop to having a lower unemployment rate than the regular recently graduated undergraduate student, whose unemployment rate, according to the Economic Policy Institute, totals 16.8 percent.” While some might call these types of lawsuits frivolous, we should remember that they support the legions of lawyers that coincidentally out-number soldiers, doctors and fi refi ghters, respectively. No law-suit is too frivolous when it goes toward supporting the pillars of
society that are lawyers. In addition to giving
lawyers something to do, law-suits also enhance democracy. After all, what better way is there to ensure democracy than by giv-ing more power to a group of elite lawyers: judges. Thanks to a plethora of lawsuits, judges not only preside over multimillion dollar judgments but also have the chance to invalidate local, state and federal laws that range from the far-reaching A! ordable Care Act to California’s ban on the delicacy foie gras. Concentra-tion of power into one branch of the government might ap-pear undemocratic, but that is a misperception. Everyone from a sheri! in Arizona to Congress itself asks the federal court sys-tem to protect them against the federal government’s tyranny.
Lawsuits also ensure that important issues get the proper
2015: ! e year of the lawsuitEli TalbertColumnist
Talbert 4
THE TALBERT REPORTTHE TALBERT REPORT
4 January 14, 2015 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
T P NS U DO K U
Today’s di! culty level: EasyPuzzles by Dailysudoku.com
E S T A B L I S H E D 1 9 1 0
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attention they deserve. For example, without lawsuits over injuries incurred while sledding, cities such as Des Moines, Iowa, Montville, N.J., Lincoln, Neb. and Columbia City, Ind. would never have thought to restrict sledding. Now those cities warn citizens of the dangers of sledding, and certain cities banned sled-ding altogether for the safety of their inhabit-ants The estimated 87 percent of voters that
believe there are too many lawsuits should remember that, without lawsuits, these type of issues would tragically be ignored. If they had their way, which thankfully is unlikely to happen, class action lawsuits over sprouts on a Jimmy John’s sandwich would be unlikely to happen and justice would not be served. And we just can’t a" ord to experience that tragedy.
Of course, like freedom, being the most litigious nation in the world doesn’t come for free . Some estimates put the direct cost of America’s lawsuits at around $250 billion a year — around 2 percent of the GDP.
Proponents of legal reform complain that these costs harm businesses and consumers alike. This all might be true, but, the value of lawsuits far outweighs the cost of them. lawsuits are so undeniably American. Reason being: lawsuits allow you not only to complain loudly about minor grievances, but also assert that a constitutional right means that com-mon sense is optional.
That is why I am issuing you this challenge: fi nd someone or something to sue in 2015. It will not be easy — you might have to slip on someone’s driveway or intentionally run in
front of a bus — but it will be worth it! But, if that is too hard, even if you merely threaten to sue a restaurant for not serving you fast enough, you will be bettering the world. This year, high-profi le lawsuits will dominate head-lines, like last year and the year before that, but it will take the actions of all Americans to truly make this year the best it can be — that is, the year of the lawsuit.
Eli writes a biweekly satirical column for The Pitt News.
Write to Eli at [email protected]
TALBERTFROM PAGE 3
5January 14, 2015 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
SPORTSThe experts — including ESPN analysts Brett McMurphy and Andrea Adelson — picked Oregon to win .
But, by being a little noncommittal, they left themselves just enough room for error.
“It’s tough for me to say this, and it’ll be close,” they said. One regretful skipping of “The Bachelor” and four quarters of football later, the Ohio State Buckeyes are national champions after beating the Oregon Ducks 42-20.
It’s just too risky to think that a former third-string quarterback with next to no experience could outlast a proven Heisman winner, as if the national title game were a one-on-one street fi ght in a WWE Smackdown ring. Oregon’s uncontainable speed and pace of play would ultimately win out over Ohio State’s bruising defensive line.
Buckeye running back Ezekiel Elliott fi n-
ished with 246 yards and four touchdowns on 36 carries, rightfully earning game MVP honors. Though Heisman winner Marcus Mariota threw for more than 300 yards and no interceptions, the dropsies plagued his re-ceivers, with multiple missed catches coming in key third down moments.
The fi rst three quarters of the National Championship Game presented by AT&T — make sure you know it was presented by AT&T because ESPN hammered it into viewers’ heads like chastity at a convent — looked like a game for the ages. Elliott moved the ball on the ground at will. Oregon quarterback Mar-cus Mariota moved the ball through the air at will — at least, when his receivers decided to catch the ball.
But as close as the fi rst 44 minutes and 55 seconds of the title game were, Elliott’s touch-down with no time remaining in the third put the Buckeyes up 28-20 and proved to be the proverbial nail in the co! n for Oregon, whose
o" ense stalled in the game’s fi nal 15 minutes. Elliott would punch in two fourth quarter scores to make sure there was no chance of his team pulling a Pitt (otherwise known as “Pitting”) on the biggest stage imaginable. And in the end it was Buckeye head coach Ur-ban Meyer, not Oregon’s Mark Helfrich, who players doused with Gatorade.
Sadly, though, we won’t remember much of this.
We’ll remember the things that had no outcome on the game whatsoever, like the Oregon Duck mascot tearing onto the fi eld, arms pumping, like he was being chased by Freddy Krueger in a golf cart. We’ll remember the camera incessantly landing on LeBron James wearing a No. 23 Ohio State jersey on the sideline, because it’s ESPN, and that had to hap-pen. We’ll remember Jimmy Kimmel’s halftime “best sign” contest, in which the winner was rewarded with an oddly phallic golden trophy.
We’ll remember Oregon’s invisible de-
fender, who forced Jameis Winston to fumble backward in the playo" ’s fi rst round, then caused a nearly identical play for Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones and the subsequent social media explosion. We’ll remember the Oregon ball boy with the 2011 Wiz Khalifa-esque afro, which seemed to pop up on screen just above ESPN’s bottom line on every play.
We’ll also never forget the Oregon cheer-leaders. Never.
But for me the biggest takeaway is that, here at the University of Pittsburgh, we’re all champions — that is, according to my favor-ite people at myteamisbetterthanyourteam.com. Since the Panthers beat Virginia Tech, the team responsible for Ohio State’s only loss, it’s logical to believe that Pitt is a better football team than Ohio State. We should be declared national champions as well — or co-champs, at the least.
Congratulations, everyone. We’re all win-ners (This is the part where you laugh).
Looking back on the college football championshipAlex Wise
Staff Writer
COLUMN
In a 71-62 loss to Clemson on Saturday after-noon, the Pitt men’s basketball team had one of its worst rebounding performances under head coach Jamie Dixon. Now, Dixon and his team will try to rebound and redeem themselves on Wednesday evening in a home contest against Florida State.
The 2014-2015 Seminoles roster lacks a few names from last year’s team, which de-feated the Panthers at home by a score of 71-66. Yet Dixon knows that he’ll still see much of the same from their ACC rivals. Much of the Seminoles’ height from last year will be back on Wednesday.
“They’re still big, but they’ve got some dif-ferent guys,” Dixon, who will attempt to re-cord his 300th career win on Wednesday, said. “They lost some experience in their seniors, but they’re doing some of the same things. They’re gonna guard the ball screens a similar way. We know what they’re going to do. We’ve just got to go out and play.”
Whether or not the Panthers can remedy their issues on the boards will be key to their success. Pitt’s struggles rebounding were on full display on Saturday when the Tigers out-rebounded the Panthers by a margin of 17.
From there, improving the team’s rebound-ing numbers will prove di! cult. Despite the departures of key contributors Okaro White, Robert Gilchrist and Aaron Thomas, the Semi-noles still boast an impressive amount of depth, particularly in the paint.
The squad features three experienced sev-en-footers: juniors Boris Bojanovsky (7’3”) and Michael Ojo (7’1”), as well as redshirt graduate student Kiel Turpin (7’0”). All three play sig-nifi cant minutes for Florida State and dwarf Pitt’s tallest player, the 6’11” Joseph Uchebo.
Despite the Seminoles’ advantage in size, junior point guard James Robinson said the team simply needs to focus on fundamentals to improve its rebounding.
“[We’ve got to] box out. We have to be more physical than them,” Robinson said. “We have to be the aggressors in the game, not just on o" ense, but on defense as well.”
Sophomore guard Chris Jones noted that the blame for the lack of rebounds doesn’t solely fall on Pitt’s bigs.
“At Pitt, we believe in team rebounding,” Jones said. “It’s not just one person. It’s ev-erybody. Guards have to get rebounds, bigs have to get re-bounds. We addressed it as a team, and we’ll get it taken care of for Wednesday.”
Dixon did acknowledge that Pitt might have to adjust to face the trio of big men that Florida State sports.
“We know that they’re a big team,” Dixon said. “We’ve got to get more size.
Dixon: Pitt must focus on rebounding against Florida StateDan Sostek
Assistant Sports Editor
MEN’S BASKETBALLMEN’S BASKETBALL
COLUMNCOLUMN
Center Joseph Uchebo could receive more attention against Florida State. Alyson Derrick | Staff Photographer
Read the rest online at Pittnews.com.
