—The Cook Political Report
Much of the thinking about the outcome of next Tuesday’s election has been binary: Does Joe Biden hang onto his lead in the polls and win, or can President Trump mount a successful comeback, threading the same needle that enabled him to win 30 states with 306 Electoral College votes last time? Another binary question: Will Republicans keep their Senate losses down to just a seat or two, remaining at 51 or 52 seats, or will Democrats score a net gain of three or four seats, emerging with the barest of majorities?
But it is hard to look closely at the presidential election and not see that, given how little time is left, the odds of a big Biden win are higher than those of a Trump come-from-behind victory. Which brings us to the growing body of evidence on the congressional-district and statewide level showing that Trump’s political problems are metastasizing and having a strong drag on down-ballot Republicans. That extends from the Senate to the House and even down to the state-legislative level, with serious congressional and legislative redistricting implications. A party never wants to have a bad election, but a big loss in a year ending in a zero is the defeat that keeps on defeating, as Democrats painfully learned after their massive 2010 losses, which reverberated for the rest of the decade.
It increasingly looks like a foregone conclusion that the GOP Senate majority is soon to be history….
Gender Bias in TA Evals We know about gender bias in student ratings of professors. A new study finds the same, troubling trend in evaluations of teaching assistants.
—Inside Higher Ed
Students’ biases about gender and other factors have been shown to skew how they evaluate their professors’ teaching. Growing wise to this, more and more universities are limiting the role that student evaluations of teaching, or SETs, play in high-stakes personnel decisions such as tenure and promotion.
But what about teaching assistants, who aren’t quite faculty, but whose instruction is still often rated by the students with whom they interact? Do the same biases show up in SETs of graduate student instructors as in SETs of professors?
Yes, according to a forthcoming study in the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture Journal. Simple in design and sobering in its results, the study found that students in an online course who had the same TA gave that TA five times as many negative evaluations when they believed that she was a woman, as compared to when they thought she was a man….
—Inside Higher Ed
In a sharply worded letter to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, key Democrats on the House education committee lambasted the department for its investigations of Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for racial bias, as well as the administration's prohibition on institutions using federal funds for diversity training.
“Such actions not only threaten to exacerbate existing structures of racism in the education system and broader society, but also infringe on an ideal the Department regularly invokes -- free speech,” wrote Education and Labor Committee chairman Bobby Scott and Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, chair of the panel’s civil rights and human services subcommittee.
. . .
The letter criticizes a number of recent actions by the administration, including its investigation of UCLA because it has opened a review into allegations that a professor repeatedly used a racial slur against Blacks in class. The department, according to the Democrats, is accusing the university of “improperly and abusively target[ing]” the professor, who is white.
. . .
Scott and Bonamici also criticized President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds to promote concepts, including that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” that the U.S. “is fundamentally racist or sexist” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The order has forced some universities to stop diversity efforts….
—Inside Higher Ed
Younger voters are on pace to make up a greater share of the electorate in key states this year than in 2016, according to Tufts University researchers.
In Texas, for instance, absentee and early votes cast by 18- to 29-year-olds made up 13 percent of all the votes cast, as of last Thursday, compared to 6 percent of the votes four years ago, found the university’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement….
Trump Picked a Fight With Higher Ed. It’s Still Learning to Punch Back. An administration defined by its onslaughts against the values of higher education has forced college leaders to weigh the benefits of political neutrality against the need to hit back.
—CHE
—CHE
Unemployment soars: L.A.-Orange County No. 2 in U.S., Inland Empire No. 8 -- The pandemic’s economic punch pushed Los Angeles and Orange counties to the second-largest jump in joblessness among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas in the past year — with the Inland Empire at No. 8. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the L.A.-O.C. region’s unemployment rate soared 9.7 percentage points to 13.6% in the year ended in September. Jonathan Lansner in the Orange County Register -- 11/2/20
McManus: Biden’s secret weapon: Anti-Trump Republicans -- If Joe Biden wins the presidency this week, he could owe part of his victory to a small but surprising constituency: disaffected Republicans who abandoned President Trump. Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times$ -- 11/1/20
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From today's NYT
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