Of all the scary prospects of Donald Trump returning to the White House—and there are enough for a Saw-level nightmare-a-day for the next 1,500-plus days—one of the scariest is the strong possibility that there won’t be any “adults in the room.

In the fall 2023, my university invited me to be the “respondent” to a lecture by Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville who was hired by the state on a six-figure salary to counter perceived left-wing bias among college professors.