John Kerry's insult actually offered a little insight. His "advice" to students at Pasadena City College in California would have been conventional wisdom on almost any "elite" campus, particularly in the Ivy League, where just about anyone is eager to tell you that only chumps go to Iraq -- or anywhere within the sound of the guns.
When President Nixon ended the draft of an earlier generation the principled protests against the Vietnam War vanished overnight. Most of the Ivy League schools continue to bar the ROTC from campus. Harvard booted ROTC in 1969 and banished it again in 1993, presumably because the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy violated campus ideals. The crimson cadets now train at MIT, funded by an alumni trust.
One of the most unpopular views of Lawrence Summers, who served briefly as president of Harvard, was his support for the military. He was the first Harvard president to talk at an ROTC commissioning ceremony after it was exiled from campus. He told his students to honor patriotism by understanding the requirements of national defense after 9/11: "Not the soft understanding that glides over questions of right and wrong, but the hard-won comprehension that the threat before us demands." He was soon exiled himself.
An honest embrace of diversity and multiculturalism would require inclusion of the military. But in the Ivy League not all diverse cultures are equal. Faculty and students share John Kerry's contempt for the military man and woman.
But the senator's inadvertent insight hasn't received the notice it deserves: A college education doesn't necessarily make someone smart. In "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," Harry R. Lewis, dean of Harvard College, describes what Harvard students don't learn even when they study. "In the absence of any pronouncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard students to know, Harvard is declaring that one can be an educated person in the 21st century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes or Shakespeare."