THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 7, 1995 TAG: 9506070491
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
Professor Carol Kerr, a former child-education instructor at Elizabeth City State University, has been granted a new U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hearing of her long-running grievance against the university.
Marsha J. Drane, director of the Charlotte district of the EEOC, notified Kerr on May 26 that her complaint against ECSU Chancellor Jimmy R. Jenkins and the university administration would be reconsidered.
"I'm pleased with this new and last-minute development," Kerr, 55, said Tuesday in Las Vegas where she is now living.
Last Feb. 21, the Raleigh office of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission rejected Kerr's claim that Jenkins and the ECSU administration discriminated against her because she is a white woman. Two years ago, Kerr's contract was not renewed after a dispute with her faculty supervisor over Kerr's alleged violation of teaching rules.
Subsequently, Kerr appealed to the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina and won reinstatement with back pay. ECSU is a predominantly black university within the 13-campus UNC system.
Kerr then resigned from ECSU, citing the "unfriendliness and coldness" that greeted her when she returned to her $40,000-a-year teaching job after the reinstatement.
When the Raleigh EEOC office turned her down and set a 90-day limit within which Kerr could appeal, Kerr hired a new lawyer to press her case against the university.
With only hours to go before the appeal deadline, Joyce L. Davis of the Raleigh legal firm of Crisp, Davis, Page & Currin won the reconsideration order from Drane, the senior U.S. EEOC district director in Charlotte.
Kerr and Dr. Carol O'Dell, a white ECSU mathematics instructor, two years ago began battling ECSU administrators and members of the university board of trustees, in a prolonged series of hearings and legal maneuvers based on their claims of gender and racial discrimination on the Elizabeth City campus.
Both professors later left ECSU. O'Dell is now head of the mathematics department at Chowan College in Murfreesboro.
ECSU officials could not be reached for comment on the EEOC decision to reconsider Kerr's complaint. by CNB