First off, congratulations to the Cubs, and to MLB for diverting us from politics with a real display of human excellence.

I told my students on Monday that, according to one expert, Trump now has about as much chance of winning as the Cubs (who were then down 3–1).

Some were offended, of course, because they thought I was dissing the Cubs’ chances. I was a bit, and my apologies.

Yesterday, it might have seemed that both the team and the candidate were about even money.

Now the analogy breaks down. Trump, it seems to me, peaked yesterday, and once again it’s likely Clinton will win comfortably, but not overwhelmingly. The Cubs will remain champions for the next year.

For higher education, it’s probably better that Trump lose, although the result will be almost as bad if he just comes close.

Overall, Trump is the best stimulus package political correctness has ever received.

At my college in the sticks, we’ve had, as they say, various isolated incidents. But mostly: Our well-raised and good-natured students have conducted themselves as ladies and gentlemen. We’ve pretty much had a “campus community” that has accommodated the various forms of diversity without the animosity that, so often, at other places, undermines both campus safety and free speech. No one denies that a limit to free speech is personal safety (meaning mainly physical safety), and so higher education depends on what used to be called the shared manners and morals that take safety mostly off the table as an issue. Campus life depends on largely unpoliced common decency.

But Trump’s brand of “Not a gentleman” has come to mean, for many, that support for him is really enabling the dangerously uncivilized and illegal behavior about which he brags. That means any decent place has to be against everything he, his deplorable supporters, and his party stand for. One danger, if Clinton wins, is that higher education will go to war against all forms of conservatism — even highly civilized traditionalism — as all forms of Trumpism that must be eradicated root and branch from our campuses. Actually, the danger is greater if Trump wins: Imagine the reaction on our campuses and in parts of our cities, places where very few voted for Trump and many consider him an existential threat. Trump, it goes without saying, would not be able to contain the huge protests against the legitimacy of his rule.

And, amazingly to me, we now have “chalkings” on my campus. They have, sadly, gone beyond “Trump 2016″ and even “Build the Wall” to deploying Trump’s most disgusting language (with accompanying drawing) that I’m not going to repeat.

Students are now divided about free speech. We now have some who want to bring safe spaces, trigger warnings, and all that to our campus, and who think that merely voicing support for one of our two major candidates for president is menacing hate speech. And we have others who are digging in about protecting all forms of free speech, including those that have little to nothing to do with free inquiry and are basically bragging (usually anonymously) about having cruel and trashy prejudices. Most of our students who support Trump aren’t deplorable at all, but clearly there are exceptions. It’s worth emphasizing that most of our students are appropriately ambivalent about the details of the right response.

Our administration has, I think, reacted responsibly: It’s voiced its support for both free speech and civilized behavior, and it may have even erred on the side of free speech by preserving the “speech” that’s most distant from civil discourse. But it’s easy to see how this situation could get out of anyone’s control, diverting us all from what we should be about at this institution of higher education — joyfully pursuing the truth we were born to share in common.

Anyway, no matter how the election goes, it’s easy to see that things might be much worse next week than they are right now.

My protest, I’ll repeat, is to vote for the fine gentleman Mike Maturen, the candidate of the American Solidarity Party. I don’t agree with Mike on some of the big issues, but I don’t doubt for a moment that he’s serving the common good as he understands it.