WHILE I WAS AT THE GYM I saw Daniel Pipes on Fox. The caption was “PROFESSORS OF HATE,” and Noam Chomsky appeared on the screen briefly. I don’t know what was said (the captioning was off, and I didn’t have my headphones) but I imagine it was along the lines of this oped.

I heard an NPR piece on antiwar protests a couple of weeks ago that suggested, rather hopefully, that college campuses would be the seedbed of a new anti-war movement. I don’t think so. The reason is that American universities don’t have the moral capital they had a generation ago. Back then they were seen as the responsible abode of the future elites, with many private schools still holding some lingering moral authority in the minds of many from their historically religious character. Deans and University Presidents were seen as responsible, thoughtful and patriotic: pillars of society in an entirely non-ironic sense. So campus opposition to the war meant something.

Now, however, the situation is different. We’ve seen universities squander their moral capital on decades of silly stuff, from free-Mumia causes celebre to P.C. idiocy and thuggishness, to open anti-Americanism, to — as we’ve seen recently — barely and reluctantly addressed instances of outright academic fraud.. What’s more, a much greater percentage of America has actually been to college, experiencing these kinds of things firsthand. America’s academic class is on the defensive, nowadays, and to a large degree it deserves to be.

The result is that I don’t think the American academy is in a position to offer much moral leadership nowadays, on the war or anything else. And I don’t think that what leadership it tries to offer is likely to be accepted. That’s too bad, in a way, but when institutions persist in acting irresponsibly, people tend to view them with less respect.