Senator Ben Sasse

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska issued a scathing takedown of President Trump during a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday.  He accused the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.

Senator Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.

In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Sen. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.

“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Sen. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”

“We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” he added.

Better late than never but why hasn’t the Republican leadership spoken out previously about what a disgrace Trump has been for the American presidency. 

Below is an audio tape of Sen. Sasse’s comments. An article reporting on his comments follows.

Tony

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New York Times

Slamming Trump, G.O.P. Senator Warns of a ‘Republican Blood Bath’

Nicholas Fandos

October 15, 2020

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, castigatedPresident Trump in a telephone town hall with constituents on Wednesday, accusing the president of bungling the response to the coronavirus pandemic, cozying up to dictators and white supremacists, and offending voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.

Mr. Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.

In a dire, nine-minute indictment of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy and what Mr. Sasse called his “deficient” values, the senator said the president had mistreated women and alienated important allies around the globe, been a profligate spender, ignored human rights and treated the pandemic like a “P.R. crisis.” He predicted that a loss by Mr. Trump on Election Day, less than three weeks away, “looks likely,” and said that Republicans would face steep repercussions for having backed him so staunchly over four tumultuous years.

“The debate is not going to be, ‘Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump?’” Mr. Sasse said, according to audio obtained by The Washington Examiner and authenticated by The New York Times. “It’s going to be, ‘What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?’”

“We are staring down the barrel of a blue tsunami,” he added.

Mr. Sasse also hinted at more drastic consequences: a “Venezuela style” Supreme Court with dozens of justices installed by ascendant Democrats; an empowered China ruling the Pacific because of Mr. Trump’s “weak” policies; and American allies doubting whether they can “trust in U.S. strength and U.S. will.”

Mr. Sasse, who is up for re-election on Nov. 3, went public with his concerns at a time when Republicans are increasingly worried that Mr. Trump is careening toward a devastating loss in November’s elections that could also cost them the Senate, handing Democrats, who already hold the House, unified control. After years of tolerating the president’s Twitter bullying and disregard for party orthodoxy and basic American norms, their patience appears to be wearing thin.

He spoke to constituents on Wednesday around the same time that senators on the Judiciary Committee were concluding their questioning of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill. Mr. Sasse, a member of the panel, had lavished praise on Judge Barrett, a favorite of conservatives who would tilt the court decidedly to the right.

Rarely has a split screen better encapsulated the trade-offs congressional Republicans have accepted over four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency than a Republican senator exulting over his conservative Supreme Court nominee in one moment and lamenting his norm-shattering behavior — and his party’s willingness to quietly tolerate it — in the next.

Mr. Sasse did not exactly try to keep his criticism quiet. James Wegmann, a spokesman who confirmed his comments, said 17,000 Nebraskans had been invited to participate in the call, though it does not appear to have been open to the general public. Mr. Sasse’s critique played out after someone on the call asked the senator about his previous criticisms of Mr. Trump.

“Like a lot of Nebraskans, I am trying to understand your relationship with the president,” the woman said. “Why do you have to criticize him so much?”

Mr. Sasse, a former university president with a doctorate in American history from Yale who styles himself as a principled conservative, has never made a secret of his distaste for Mr. Trump. During the 2016 campaign, he compared Mr. Trump to David Duke and refused to vote for him. In office, he called Mr. Trump’s signature trade war with China “nuts.”

But he had toned down his criticism in recent years, earning a crucial endorsement from the president he once savaged.

The remarks on Wednesday were far more scathing than any others he has made recently, and particularly notable given the tight hold Mr. Trump has taken over the Republican Party in his four years as president.

Mr. Sasse, 48, began by saying that he had worked hard to develop a “working relationship” with Mr. Trump, and even prayed for the president because he is one of “our leaders.” He said he was pleased when Mr. Trump adopted traditionally conservative policy stances and nominated conservative judges. And, he added, he understood that some Nebraska voters were “frustrated” with his criticisms of the president.

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But the compliments stopped there.

“I’m not at all apologetic for having fought for my values against his in places where I think his are deficient, not just for a Republican but for an American,” Mr. Sasse said.

He argued that Mr. Trump had “careened from curb to curb” as he sought to respond to a pandemic that has claimed more than 217,000 American lives this year.

“He refused to treat it seriously,” Mr. Sasse said. “For months, he treated it like a news-cycle-by-news-cycle P.R. crisis.”

He added that he did not think Mr. Trump’s leadership through the crisis had been “reasonable or responsible, or right.”

The “deficiencies” added up from there.

“The way he kisses dictators’ butts,” Mr. Sasse said, listing his reservations about Mr. Trump. “I mean, the way he ignores that the Uighurs are in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang right now. He hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong Kongers.”

He continued: “The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor.”

Mr. Trump “mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” he added. “His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He’s flirted with white supremacists.”

Each of these things, Mr. Sasse predicted, would have consequences, for Republicans and the nation. He sounded particularly alarmed about the potential damage Mr. Trump, who supported Democrats for decades as a businessman, could do to the conservative cause in the long term by driving the country “to the left.”

Young people, he said, could “become permanent Democrats because they’ve just been repulsed by the obsessive nature of our politics.” Women, who have abandoned the party in droves, could decide “they need to turn away from this party permanently in the future.”

“I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican blood bath in the Senate, and that’s why I’ve never been on the Trump train,” he said. “It’s why I didn’t agree to be on his re-election committee, and it’s why I’m not campaigning for him.”

In a statement, Mr. Wegmann did not comment on Mr. Sasse’s remarks. He said the senator would remain focused on Senate races.

“I don’t know how many more times we can shout this,” Mr. Wegmann said. “Even though the Beltway is obsessing exclusively about the presidential race, control of the Senate is 10 times more important.”

View from our deck!

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine and I, will be traveling today to return home after spending a few days on Nantucket.

We stayed in a beach house on a very quiet part of the island.

Lots of good quality time with each other and family.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Below are five takeaways from last night’s Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s town halls courtesy of NBC News.  I saw most of the Biden town hall and thought he handled his questions quite well.

Tony

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NBC News

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Joe Biden were in different cities for the dueling town halls Thursday that replaced their debate. But they may as well have been in different universes.

Replacing the presidential debate with competing conversations with voters was a fitting symbol of a politically divided and socially distanced America. Instead of speaking to, or even shouting at, each other, Trump and Biden spoke past one another on different networks, allowing Americans to choose a favored candidate to describe reality as they want to see it.

The town halls hosted by NBC in Miami for Trump and ABC in Philadelphia for Biden are unlikely to attract nearly the audience a debate would, history suggests, and even many Republicans were baffled by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the second presidential debate when he’s down in the polls and needs every opportunity possible to try disrupt the race’s status quo.

Going into the town hall, Biden led Trump by 9.2 points in the NBC News national polling average. Most swing-state polls in recent months show the Democrat to be the favorite.

It was not clear the town halls would change the trajectory.

Here are five takeaways from the two events courtesy of NBC News.

1. Trump gives oxygen to extremists — again

At the first debate, Trump claimed he didn’t know much about the Proud Boys, a violent far-right extremist group, but told them to “stand back and stand by” in a move they heard as an endorsement.

In his NBC town hall, Trump claimed he didn’t know much about QAnon, the groundless conspiracy theory that claims elites run a vast baby-eating satanic cult, but Trump said something they are sure to hear as an endorsement.

“I know nothing about QAnon,” he said. “I do know that they are very much against pedophilia and I agree with that.”

An FBI field office recently warned that “fringe political conspiracy theories” like QAnon “very likely motivate some domestic extremists” (it already has motivated some acts of violence) and social media giants have clamped down on QAnon.

Trump also bristled when Savannah Guthrie asked him to clearly and forcefully condemn white supremacists, but the only reason he keeps getting the question is because he seems so uncomfortable answering what would be a layup for any other politician — including his own vice president.

“I denounced white supremacy,” he said. “What’s your next question?”

2. Joe Biden says 1994 crime bill was ‘a mistake’

Biden gave his most pointed denunciation yet of the 1994 crime bill that he helped write, which has been linked to the rise of mass incarceration with disproportionate impacts on Black Americans.

Asked if it was a mistake to support it, Biden said: “Yes, it was.”

He elaborated by saying things have “changed drastically” since 1994 and noted that many Black leaders at the time supported it. He pinned a heavy part of the blame on “what the states did locally” and said the goal of the bill was “same time for the same crime.” Still, Biden conceded, “It was a mistake.”

Moments earlier, iden was asked by a young Black man why his demographic should feel motivated enough to vote for him — a question that cut to the heart of one of the former vice president’s weaknesses: A lack of enthusiasm among young voters, including non-white millennial and Gen Z voters, who lean left but tend to be unreliable at the ballot box.

Biden cited numerous policy proposals such as making the criminal justice system more “fair,” boosting funding for historically black colleges and universities, and helping Black Americans accumulate wealth by guaranteeing first-term home buyers a $15,000 down payment.

3. Biden says his approach on Supreme Court changes ‘depends’

Biden gave his most extensive answer yet on the possibility of expanding the Supreme Court as Republicans move to confirm Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

“It depends on how this turns out,” he said, referring to the confirmation process in the GOP-led Senate and whether it is rushed through before Election Day.

He said he’s still “not a fan” of “court-packing” because it could lead to a tit-for-tat escalation. He expressed more openness to changing rules surrounding lifetime tenure of justices in a way that complies with the Constitution. But he didn’t commit to any course of action, saying that much of it depends on how Republicans approach the Barrett nomination.

“I’m open to considering what happens from that point on,” he said.

Biden criticized Barrett as a nominee who “didn’t answer very many questions at all” and said that LGBTQ Americans have “great reason to be concerned” that she could vote to take away their rights. He added that people should also be concerned about their access to health care with a Republican-led lawsuit to invalidate the Affordable Care Act headed to the Supreme Court.

4. Trump forgot to attack Biden

The president has one job if he is to turn around his weak standing in the polls: Bring down Biden, just as he brought down Hillary Clinton in the closing days of their 2016 battle.

But over the course of the hour on national television, Trump barely mentioned his rival, let alone in the kind of sustained way necessary to do damage to the frontrunner. When he did mention Biden’s name, it was mostly to attack the news media for not asking the Democrat the questions Trump wanted them to.

Trump’s entire campaign strategy, like that of the other incumbent presidents before him, is built around making the election a choice between him and Biden, instead of a referendum on his presidency, and Trump has been more on-message at his rallies and with friendlier interviewers.

But under Guthrie’s tough, rapid-fire questions, Trump missed opportunities to pivot to Biden and largely gave the former vice president a pass.

5. Two candidates, two vastly different tones

It was apt that two polar-opposite candidates offered polar-opposite tones as they faced questions from the moderators and voters. Biden spoke in calm and conciliatory tones, calling for listening to scientists on a national coronavirus policy and promising to work with Republicans to achieve bipartisan goals.

“What I will be doing, if I’m elected president — not a joke,” he said. “I’m going to pick up the phone and call them and say, let’s get together.”

He predicted that with Trump and his “vindictiveness” gone, “there’s going to be, I promise you, between four and eight Republican senators who are going to be willing to move on things where there’s bipartisan consensus.” It was a version of a line he used on the campaign trail, often to criticism from progressives who argued he was being naïve about the GOP.

Trump, meanwhile, was often hostile to Guthrie’s questioning. He complained constantly about the media, the IRS, and others treating him unfairly.

He sowed doubt about the science around the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting masks will not protect people despite what nearly all of his advisers say. And he said getting sick from the virus himself had not changed his views on masks, even as his ally Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for the first debate, said Thursday that he was wrong for not wearing a mask after being put into intensive care with the disease himself.

Tony

Flower Darby

Dear Commons Community,

Flower Darby, an instructional designer and the author, with James M. Lang, of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes, had an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education with important  advice for faculty still coming to grips with teaching remotely.  She opens with “People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums.”  As someone who has been teaching online since 1996, I agree with her fully. The article proceeds to suggest 6 ways to lead meaningful class discussions in an asynchronous online forum.

If you are still struggling with teaching online, her advice and suggestions are worth the read.

The entire article is below.

Tony

PS:  Ms. Darby will also be a keynote speaker in November at the OLC ACCELERATE Conference.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Secret Weapon of Good Online Teaching – Discussion Forums

By Flower Darby

People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums.

As a veteran online teacher, I view discussion forums as the meat and potatoes of my online courses. They are where my teaching happens — where I interact with students, guide their learning, and get to know them as people. The joy I’ve come to find in online teaching stems directly from those interactions.

Covid-19 has all of us preparing for a fall semester unlike any we’ve ever seen. Online teaching is front and center again, but remains underexplored terrain for many faculty members. Learning how to use online class-discussion forums to their best advantage is probably the smartest, and easiest, thing you can do to improve your online teaching and your students’ learning.

Why? First, they reinforce what we’re all hearing from teaching experts: Lean into asynchronous teaching, and do more with your campus Learning Management System (LMS). That’s been my focus in this online teaching series (with previous installments on how to connect with students and be more inclusive).

Second, online discussions are the equitable and inclusive workhorse of online teaching. Using assistive technology, students with disabilities can use an LMS forum more easily than a Zoom discussion. And the low-tech nature of the forums can diminish inequities in other important ways:

• Students can submit discussion posts at any time of the day or night, and they don’t need a fast internet connection to do so.
• They’re not required to show their physical surroundings to participate.
• Forums get students to interact with one another, which is crucial to helping them feel connected and engaged in virtual classrooms.

Leading an effective discussion in an online forum is a skill you can learn, much as you learned how to lead class discussions in person. A forum discussion just seems harder to oversee because it’s so unfamiliar — you probably never participated in one yourself as a student. To that end, here are six simple ways to foster meaningful conversations in an online forum:

Take part in the discussion. Full disclosure: There is a school of thought that suggests only students should comment in your course’s online discussion forum, and not you, the instructor. But I’m in the school that argues just the opposite. Would you announce a discussion in your brick-and-mortar classroom, and then walk out the door? If not, don’t do it online.

Stay in the (virtual) room. Post clarifying questions. Praise positive contributions. Probe for more detail. Clear up misconceptions. Guide and shape the learning — just as you would in person — to help students get to where you want them to go. I tell my students that if I post in the discussion forum, they should read it, because I’m communicating something they need to know. Basically, when I post, I’m teaching. My students pay attention, and feel more engaged with me, as a result.

Another reason to pay close attention is to make sure incivility doesn’t intrude into your class forums because of different cultural values and perspectives. A good example comes from the educator Courtney Plotts: Say a student writes a post mentioning a same-sex partner and gets no replies. That might happen for any number of reasons, but the result is that the student could feel excluded, become disengaged, and struggle to finish the course.

Scour the discussion forums for emerging trouble spots and for clues that reveal how students are doing. Are they confused about something and drifting off? Are they energized and fascinated by a particular unit? The course forum is a valuable source of information to guide your teaching, but you can benefit from it only if you stay in the room.

But be strategic about your participation. It’s possible to spend too much time interacting with students in a class-discussion forum — especially if you enjoy the interactions, as I do — to the point that it becomes a major drain on your time and energy.

Good time-management strategies can help. Block off times in your weekly calendar to post on the discussion board. Short blocks of 20 to 30 minutes will suffice. All you really want to do is be visible in the conversation so that students know you’re there and engaged. If you’re teaching a 16-week course, posting a few days a week should do the trick. (For a condensed term of five or eight weeks, I might post for 20 minutes, twice a day, four to six days a week.)

The point is to use your written contributions to facilitate learning, just as you do verbally in your face-to-face teaching.

Some instructors keep a spreadsheet and intentionally rotate which students they respond to each week. Others are more like me: After doing this for 12 years, I go by gut instinct, deciding where I can have the most impact with a quick comment or question, while informally making an effort to write to all students at various times. Just be intentional in choosing where you can get the most bang for your discussion-posting buck.

The better the question, the better the debate. The tried-and-true method of sparking good in-person discussions is to ask open-ended questions and avoid the yes-or-no kind. Yet too often in the online realm, I’ve seen faculty members post discussion questions so black-and-white that there was no room for nuance. Nothing to talk about. Students’ answers were right or wrong, with no way to sustain a meaningful conversation.

In a recent article about transitioning to online teaching, Laura Otten, an associate professor who teaches nonprofit-leadership courses at La Salle University, wrote about the importance of provocative questions in online forums: “I often ask my students this question: ‘Do nonprofits, regardless of their mission, have an obligation to work for social justice?’” That’s a perfect example of the kind of question that gives students something to talk about.

Ask students to write about something they find naturally interesting — like themselves. Engaging students in discussion doesn’t always require a controversial or sensitive topic. Instead, ask students to apply course content or concepts to their own lives and experiences.

An easy way to do that is to adapt James M. Lang’s recommendation on connection questions. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity: Take a concept you’re teaching, and ask students to post about where else they’ve seen or learned about it. Maybe they first heard about it in high school, in the workplace, in a movie, or in another class they’re taking right now. Get them to post about that first encounter, or other instances when they’ve interacted with the concept.

Having students discuss what they know, based on personal experience, helps them learn from one another, too. The resulting kaleidoscope of perspectives can offer students a rich web of connections.

Structure the online conversation. Without any structure, you end up with a lot of students pulling a “post and run” — an industry term for posting an obligatory comment in a forum, and then never returning to engage with others. It’s amusingly illustrated in a video, “Teacherless Online Classroom – Discussion Bored,” and clearly doesn’t lead to meaningful, sustained conversations.

So establish a few simple ground rules:

• Set two deadlines a week — the first for an initial post and the second for a minimum number of replies (usually at least two) to other students’ comments.
• Provide a rubric or a checklist (try using the rubric tool in your campus LMS; it really speeds up grading) to clearly communicate the criteria for success: How long should a post be? Can the style be informal and conversational? Is a scholarly citation needed?
• Discourage students — explicitly — from posting “Yeah, I agree” kinds of replies.
• In some learning-management systems, you can enable a setting that requires students to post their initial comment before they can read what other students have shared. That setting has pros and cons: It can encourage academic integrity and originality, but it can also hinder less-confident students and raise barriers to their success. Think through the purpose of your discussion to determine whether this feature aligns with your pedagogical goals.

Aim for organic, authentic conversation. Critics of online discussion forums assert that the dialogue is stilted, dry, tedious. And it certainly can be, especially if you insist on stilted, formal dialogue. It doesn’t help that many faculty members have never seen an invigorating online discussion in action.

But think about what happens in a good in-person discussion: You try to foster a stimulating dialogue that keeps students’ attention and furthers their learning. Here’s what doesn’t happen: You don’t require each student in an in-person discussion to say one original thing and respond twice to other students; you don’t require them to speak formally and include citations. Why, then, expect students to be so formal in your online discussion forum?

Instead, try to foster the kind of natural dialogue you would actually want to join. Maybe you don’t have to require citations in every discussion post. Maybe you can take a cue from how people regularly communicate in digital spaces, and invite students to use emoji, GIFs, memes, videos, and the like in their posts. We routinely rely on such visual tools when we text on smartphones or post on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. While I don’t advocate that every instructor start using social media in class, I do argue that we can use communication strategies from those platforms to create closer connections in an online course.

So encourage your students to use emoji in their discussion posts. Ask them to post a GIF that depicts how they are feeling about a particular topic or task. Have students create and share a meme that represents how their semester is going. We can communicate powerfully and connect meaningfully online. Let’s learn from our texting and social-media habits to help us do so in class-discussion forums.

We have a difficult semester ahead. Don’t overlook the potential of online forums to enhance your teaching and even ease your workload. Once you get comfortable with these tips and tricks, I think you’ll find they really work. You may well decide to keep online forums in your teaching toolbox even when Covid-19 is a thing of the past.

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting that Melania Trump said yesterday that her and the president’s teenage son, Barron, tested positive for the coronavirus not long after his parents, but had no symptoms. She made the revelation in a lengthy note chronicling her personal experience with COVID-19, including being hit with a “roller coaster” of symptoms that she treated naturally with vitamins and healthy food.

Mrs. Trump said she is now negative and hopes to resume her duties soon.

After she and President Donald Trump tested positive earlier this month, the White House said 14-year-old Barron had tested negative. Barron later tested positive for the virus but had no symptoms, she said Wednesday, adding that he has since tested negative again.

Mrs. Trump shared that after she and her husband first received their positive results, “naturally, my mind went immediately to our son.” She said she was relieved when he tested negative at first, but kept thinking about what would happen in the days to come.

“My fear came true when he was tested again and it came up positive,” the first lady wrote in a statement released to social media.

She said she was “glad the three of us went through this at the same time so we could take care of one another and spend time together.”

President Trump has called his bout with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, a “ blessing in disguise.” He was hospitalized for three days and treated with various therapies and drugs, including steroids, supplemental oxygen and an experimental antibody treatment.

Mrs. Trump did not explain why Barron’s positive diagnosis was not made public earlier, but she has fiercely protected the ninth-grader’s privacy.

As for her own trials with the disease, the first lady said she was “fortunate” to have had minimal symptoms, “though they hit me all at once and it seemed to be a roller coaster of symptoms in the days after.”

She described body aches, a cough and headaches and said she felt extremely tired most of the time.

To treat it, “I chose to go a more natural route in terms of medicine, opting more for vitamins and healthy food,” she said.

The first lady praised the care provided by Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, the White House physician, and his team, and said it was an “unfamiliar feeling” to be the patient.

“It was me being taken care of now, and getting first-hand experience with all that COVID-19 can do,” she said. The disease has killed more than 216,000 people in the U.S. and caused nearly 7.9 million infections here, according to the latest count from Johns Hopkins University.

Democrat Joe Biden has made President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic an issue in the presidential campaign.

Most coronavirus patients suffer mild to moderate symptoms and recover quickly, typically anywhere from two to six weeks, according to the World Health Organization, though older, sicker patients tend to take longer to get well.

Tony

                                                                          National Student Clearinghouse as of September 24, 20202

Dear Commons Community,

According to the latest report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, freshman enrollment is down nationwide by 16.1 percent.  The data also show a continuation of downward trends in undergraduate enrollment (see figure above) and among various demographic groups that the research organization reported last month.

But its findings about freshmen were both new and striking, including that the population of first-time community-college students dropped 22.7 percent from a year ago. The latest report reflects data on 9.2 million students at 54 percent of the postsecondary institutions reporting to the research center, and is current as of September 24. Among the report’s other findings:

• Undergraduate enrollment for the fall is 4 percent lower than it was a year ago, which is steeper than the 2.5-percent drop in undergraduates recorded last month.
• Decreases across all racial and ethnic groups are steeper than those described a month ago.
• Undergraduate male enrollment fell at nearly triple the rate of the drop in female enrollment (6.4 percent versus 2.2 percent).
• Undergraduate enrollment was down across all types of institutions, except at four-year for-profit colleges, where it increased by 3 percent over last fall.
• Graduate enrollment increased, but at a lower rate — 2.7 percent — than the 3.9 percent observed last month.

These data are cause for concern.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Not Our Faith, a new bipartisan Christian super PAC is taking on President Donald Trump with an ad that accuses him of hypocrisy when it comes to matters of faith.  

“Mr. President, the days of using our faith for your benefit are over,” the ad from Not Our Faith warns. “We know you need the support of Christians like us to win this election. But you can’t have it.”

The spot also accuses Trump of “using Christianity for his own purposes,” and shows footage of his Bible-toting photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, across from the White House, after having peaceful protesters teargassed to clear the area for him. 

Not Our Faith’s advisory council includes Michael Wear, a faith adviser to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, and Autumn Vandehei, who was an aide to former Rep. Tom Delay (R-Texas), The Associated Press reported. The group is launching a six-figure TV and digital ad campaign targeting Christians, especially evangelical and Catholic voters.

“Trump eked out 2016 with unprecedented support from white evangelicals and, important to note, a really strong showing among Catholics. We’re going after all of it,” Wear told AP. “We think Christian support is on the table in this election.”

Indeed, last week more than 1,600 Christian leaders signed a letter endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden. And this week, a Pew poll found that Trump is bleeding support among Christian voters, including the evangelicals who were essential to his 2016 victory. 

“Christians don’t need Trump to save them,” the new ad states. “The truth is that Trump needs Christians to save his flailing campaign.”

In a USA Today op-ed, Wear took issue with Trump’s bold claims about faith ― and in particular spoke out against Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, for proclaiming that Trump had “literally saved” Christianity. 

“For Christians, of course, the position of Savior is already filled,” Wear wrote. “And Jesus is one person Trump can’t fire or bully.”

Amen!

Tony

William R. Doyle

Dear Commons Community,

William R. Doyle, a professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, has an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled Higher Education’s Nightmare Scenario.  In it he rings an alarm that public colleges face two crises: the impact of Covid-19 on their operations and a downturn in state funding brought on by the current recession. And based on what state budget offices are saying, the funding problem for higher education is about to get a lot worse. Without action by the federal government, higher education in most states will be facing severe cuts, very likely larger than those incurred during the recession of 2008-9. Here is his analysis:

“There has already been a large contraction in our industry’s work force, and state systems are feeling the pain: In Pennsylvania, for instance, a plan to lay off approximately 350 faculty members has reportedly been expedited. All of that may merely be prelude to a looming, historic decline in the sector. There is time to act, but the window is closing. Academic leaders are planning now for unprecedented cuts.

The current budget plan for most states was developed in an entirely different economy, with radically different expectations for state revenues. Fiscal years generally start on July 1, and are named for the year that they end. States are now in the 2021 fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2020, through the end of June 2021. They adopted budgets for the 2021 fiscal year based on revenue and expenditure projections that took place in the fall-winter of 2019-20, that were then proposed to state legislatures in the winter-spring of 2020 and adopted in most states in the summer of 2020. As one can imagine, those revenue and expenditure predictions may as well have taken place in a different world.

According to an analysis by the National Association of State Budget Officers, state revenues decreased enough from April to June to completely wipe out the previous three-quarters of strong performance. Before Covid-19, states had been expecting strong year-over-year revenue growth. By the time they settled their end-of-fiscal-year books, they saw roughly a 6-percent shortfall in general funds.

State leaders, including governors and legislators, made use of an already-strong fiscal position, existing reserves, and emergency funds, and the federal government’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, to cover the initial costs imposed by the crisis. Those reserves may allow states to fund their operations through some of the current fiscal year. But, by and large, they are out of options for the 2022 fiscal year.

When will this harsh new reality hit higher education in full? States’ planning for budget decisions starts with budget offices’ sending out guidance to state agencies — including higher education — detailing how to structure requests for funding. Those documents set the expectations for budget requests. (While actual policy will be determined by the governor and the legislature, a good budget office will let agencies know what to expect.) The picture those guidance documents paint is bleak: Those released in the last few months contain extraordinary warnings as to the possibility of unprecedented cuts.

Washington State’s guidance to state agencies says:

“For the 2021–23 biennium, forecasted revenue growth will not meet current demands on the state’s resources … In addition to the current difficult economic situation created by Covid-19, Washington continues to face a structural budget gap because the state’s tax and revenue system does not keep pace with the increasing demands for services of a growing population.”

As a result, Washington’s budget office is asking its agencies to prepare for cuts of up to 15 percent.

Ohio’s Office of Budget and Management is asking for two types of requests, one that includes a 10-percent reduction in costs, and another that covers the minimum required to continue offering current services. In Illinois the budget director told its agencies to prepare for 10-percent cuts in the 2022 fiscal year. Gov. J.B. Pritzker called this a “nightmare scenario.” The list goes on: Connecticut’s budget office is asking for cuts of 10 percent. Minnesota has warned its agencies to expect a decrease of 9 percent.

Those kinds of across-the-board requests for cuts are particularly alarming for higher education. We tend to ultimately receive bigger budget cuts than other agencies during recessionary periods because, unlike other state budget categories such as elementary and secondary education or public assistance, higher ed has its own revenue stream in the form of tuition. Even though many do so reluctantly, state legislators have relied on higher education to be the balance wheel of state finance, covering gaps in revenues that can’t be covered by other state budget categories.

In the past, state cuts of 10 to 15 percent have resulted in decreased enrollment capacity, tuition increases in the range of 20 percent, staff layoffs, departmental and unit closures, and layoffs for both tenured and untenured faculty members due to fiscal exigency. Tuition increases and cuts in state financial-aid programs during recessions mean that prices go up at the exact time when fewer people can afford to pay. If the past is a guide, we can expect that tuition increases in this range will result in many more students’ being priced out of a college degree. And those students who do enroll will have no choice but to borrow even more to pay for college.

The layoffs and cuts in programs in previous recessions have been moderated by other forces. In past downturns, enrollment tended to grow as younger people and older working adults who were not in the labor market sought to expand their skills. In addition, many public colleges turned to out-of-state and international students, who pay much higher tuition and thus can be lucrative sources of revenue.

This time is different. Given travel restrictions and students’ unwillingness to travel far from home during the pandemic, those options most likely will not be available. Early indicators show that, so far in this recession, undergraduate enrollment is down. Faced with both declining enrollments and steep budget cuts, many public colleges may face the possibility of drastic cuts, which could cause them to be unable to fulfill their missions of research, teaching, and service.

The fallout from the initial round of budget reductions is already being felt. The University of Massachusetts has announced indefinite furloughs of 850 employees. The University of Delaware and Rutgers are both planning layoffs of adjunct faculty and staff members. Worryingly, all of those changes are happening before the kinds of cuts anticipated by state policy makers in the next fiscal year.

There’s only so much state policy makers can do to support our sector right now. Governors and legislators in most states must balance their budgets, and there simply isn’t enough tax revenue to collect from citizens who are facing high unemployment and decreased earnings. State leaders will also need to fund critical functions such as health care, K-12 education, and public assistance.

The solution lies with the federal government, which must step in to avert cuts that could imperil higher education’s ability to fulfill its mission. Congress can and should act to provide assistance to the states, with provisions made to ensure that colleges and universities receive much-needed funding that could be used to assure access and to keep colleges affordable. At the moment, it seems such a program is exceedingly unlikely. Meanwhile, the window to act continues to shrink, and plans proceed for a future of higher prices, fewer students, a smaller academic work force, and reduced opportunity.”

A horrible situation that will only get worse without financial assistance from the federal government.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Asked about whether he would back expanding the US Supreme Court to more than nine justices, Joe Biden said on Monday that he’s “not a fan of court packing.”

“I’ve already spoken on — I’m not a fan of court packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue. I want to keep focused,” the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC.

The former vice president said Trump’s decision to quickly fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ahead of the election is the “court packing” that he wants people to pay attention to.

“The focus is why is he doing what he’s doing now? Why now with less than 24 days to go until the election?” he said. “That’s the court packing…the public should be focused on.”

Biden’s comments Monday were his clearest on the issue since Ginsburg’s death and come as he and his vice presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., have been hit with a barrage of GOP attacks and deflected numerous questions from the press in recent weeks about whether they would expand the Supreme Court.

Biden and Harris dodged the question at both of their respective debates. Last weekend, Biden created a stir when he said in response to a reporter’s question that voters “don’t deserve” to know his position on the issue, because it would only be a distraction. He had said he would reveal his stance after Nov. 3.

Republicans have been arguing that if Biden and Harris are elected, they would seek to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court to dilute its conservative majority. Such a change — which is backed by progressive groups — could be done legislatively but Democrats would need to win control of the Senate in order for that scenario to even become a reality.

While serving in the Senate, Biden had previously expressed opposition to expanding the Supreme Court and said as recently as last year during the Democratic primary that it would be a “bad idea.”

“It will come back to bite us,” he said. “It should not be a political football.”

I would add that in addition to President Trump’s rush to appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the US Senate who would not accept President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland in March 2016, as another prime example of court packing.

Tony