Aww, Shucky Ducky: Voter Response to Accusations of Herman Cain’s “Inappropriate Behavior”

In a Fox News Poll from October 23 to 25, Herman Cain’s 24% led all candidates for the GOP nomination. On October 30, 2011, Politico reported that two women accused Cain of sexual harassment and misconduct. Two additional women came forward to accuse Cain of sexual harassment.4 In late November, a fifth woman alleged that she had a 13-year affair with Cain. Although Cain denied the allegations and the affair, he suspended his campaign on December 3 as a result of these “character assassinations.”6 This rapid deterioration of Cain’s presidential trajectory illustrates that the public seems to care about the scandalous behavior of candidates. Although several studies identify a negative eff ect of scandal on the public’s attitudes, individual-level predispositions often moderate this reaction. Specifically, motivated reasoning encourages biased processing of scandalous information such that a candidate’s fellow partisans are least affected by the scandal

How what type of news you watch can influence how you reactto a scandal in a presidential primary.

Despite the 2016 election being more than a year away the presidential primary season appears to be in full swing, especially for the Republican Party, with its plethora of candidates. With the possibility of a scandal breaking for at least one candidate before the primary a seeming near certainty, it’s useful to examine why voters react to scandals in the way that they do. David A. M. Peterson and Beth Miller Vonnahme investigate the scandal around allegations of sexual harassment in 2012 that ended Herman Cain’s bid for the nomination. They find that those who watched network news declined the most in their assessment of Cain after the scandal, and cable news watchers, the least

The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In this issue, podcasts are looked at as a pedagogical game changer. Using the award-wining podcast Serial as their catalyst, this issue's essayists look at podcast's emerging role in higher education, how multimodal learning can help students find their voices, the podcast's place in the curriculum at a criminal justice college, and how podcasts can inspire students to reflectively assess their own writing. Our reviewers take a critical look at the podcasts Welcome to Night Vale and Revisionist History

Developing a Mathematics Capstone Experience at The U.S. Air Force Academy

There are many details to consider when designing a capstone experience. Expectations of students, faculty workload, resources, logistics, and timing all play a part in the value of this endeavor. We discuss the experience of creating a research capstone experience from scratch including the components of our current course as well as lessons learned. Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher’s online edition of PRIMUS to view the supplemental file