Over at The Morningside Post, a blog from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs that I helped found, we're having a debate about whether or not veterans come to campuses, especially, well-heeled Ivy League and other private academies, and lose the respect they rightfully deserve for having served our nation in combat. Ultimately, this debate seems to focus too much on the wrong things.

This debate was triggered by one Matt Sanchez, who braved the Mesopotamian sands as a Marine, only to find himself "publicly humiliated" by a Columbia University classmate and told he was stupid for joining up. He told this tale of woe in an op-ed for the New York Post. Beyond his concern with other students, he added that "The school also has no faculty member who specifically deals with veteran affairs."

My friend, classmate, and co-conspirator Jimmy Finan wrote a letter in response, which the Post was kind enough to print. Jimmy is also a veteran (of our overseas adventure in Afghanistan), and he chided Sanchez for giving more ammunition to the Fox News nutters, adding that his "experiences at Columbia have been nothing but the polar opposite of" Sanchez's own. With Michelle Malkin picking up Sanchez's story, and offering fodder for other raging right wing bloggers, it seems like Finan was on target with his prediction. The two proceeded to have an interesting back and forth that I think is worth examination - two veterans debating how welcome they feel inside the academy.

As an Ivy League faker (I only paid for an expensive grad school education, after all), my experience with this debate is a little new. At the University of Iowa, we had *a lot* of students in the reserves, and there was really only a tiny population of students who would call them stupid, if they had the chance. Ultimately, at a state-run school like Iowa, most aren't rich, and most understand that enlisting in the nation's armed services is just another means to pay for an education that grew in cost every year. You might not be considered lucky for having to do it, but certainly no one questions your smarts, especially in the 90s of my education when America's wide-scale military commitments seemed a thing of the past.

But in the Ivy League, perhaps it was a little bit different. With a larger class of students who come straight out of the intelligentsia, the fashionable nature of protest is more pronounced. Intellectual entrepreneurs are more likely to seek out targets, and Corporal Sanchez is therefore far more likely to have a bad day.

But is Corporal Sanchez an intellectual entrepreneur himself? His political leanings are not tipped off in his article, and I don't want to hoist any assumptions upon him. But at a school like the University of Iowa, being a veteran or a reservist is far less likely to make one stand out. At Columbia University, being an advocate of the Iraq War who has been there and come back is far more likely to get your name in the New York Post.

While Corporal Sanchez complains about the intellectual trends at Columbia, it's funny to reflect on the intellectual pincers that the school's administration faces. While SIPA's Dean Lisa Anderson was being assailed as one of the most dangerous professors in America by David Horowitz for bringing Libyans to campus and later inviting the President of Iran to speak, she was also facing an insurgency within her own student body accusing her of quashing leftist literature from the school's curriculum.

So, the administrators of Columbia U. and other elite institutions sure are getting some mixed messages. Their students rise up and call them right-wing saps, while the Fox News crowd identifies them as traitors polluting the minds of our nation's young people.

But ultimately, I think the Dean Lisa Anderson's and President Lee Bollinger's of the world see the kind of aggravation that Sanchez faced as a safety valve that allows students to blow off steam. In the meanwhile, Columbia's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies is still mostly bringing people to campus to lecture about how to fight wars because peace is an impossible state in our world, and the university is signing up its life sciences faculty to help the Department of Defense develop protections for our troops against biological weapons attacks. Joseph Masad could sell 10,000 books about how Israel kills Palestinians. But at the end of the day, Ivy League students are receiving Boren National Security and Presidential Management Fellowships in huge numbers. When student Marxists show up to protest a CIA clandestine services information session, they can't find chairs and get shouted down by 50-plus students eager to learn more about getting jobs as "targeting officers." There might be a million protests against wars in Iraq, Sudan, and Lebanon, but the homeland security contracts that university-linked entities pursue are counted in multi-millions of dollars, and it's on this side that the academy comes down.

So, I think Matt Sanchez should have a sense of humor about this. The academic administrators know that most of his adversaries will grow up, get jobs, and put down their arm bands and placards. Meanwhile, our Department of Defense is always looking for well-educated people eager to contribute to the furtherance of our nation's security in so many different ways. While an Ivy League school's wanna-be proletariat may make a lot of noise as they matriculate, at the end of four (or more, or less) years, they are happy to take shake hands with that same university administrator who is eager to bring government and military contracts to his or her school.