It’s hard to imagine a more misguided set of priorities than those that led Columbia’s University Senate to vote 55-to-11 against returning the Reserve Officers Training Corps to Columbia. Leading the charge against ROTC was the university’s president, Lee Bollinger. Mr. Bollinger doesn’t seem willing to take on the anti-Israel faction in his own Middle East studies department, so it’s not surprising he’d oppose his university enlisting in the battle against the terrorists that our military is fighting so bravely today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

The excuse given for keeping ROTC off campus is the law passed in 1993 by a Congress in which both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. It is Title 10, section 654 of the United States Code, and it outlines a policy that, as implemented by the Pentagon, is known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass. But make no mistake about it; no matter what Mr. Bollinger and company say, the aversion to ROTC on Morningside Heights has next to nothing to do with the military’s treatment of gays and lesbians. Columbia ended ROTC in 1969.

The action then was taken not as a cutting-edge measure for gay rights but as a capitulation to the violent protests against the Vietnam War that were led by Mark Rudd of Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Rudd is still at it; his Web site carries a speech citing the events of the late 1960s as inspiration for today. “We have to make so much noise, so much propaganda, that the American people and the American soldiers in Iraq will hear us. They have to understand that the people fighting them are not ‘Al Queda’ or evil Jordanian terrorists sent by some shadowy al Zaqarwe, but, rather, Iraqis who don’t like their country being invaded,” Mr. Rudd says.

Another tip-off that the opposition to ROTC at Columbia has nothing to do with gay rights is the lack of protest of the policies of the Islamist enemy in respect of gay rights. The enemy the American military is fighting in Iraq and elsewhere in this war is one for which the punishment for open homosexuality isn’t just getting kicked out of the military, but flogging, imprisonment, even execution. If Mr. Bollinger thinks he is helping the causes of tolerance or civil rights by staying on the sidelines of this war, he is misunderstanding the current fight as badly as an earlier generation on Morningside Heights misjudged Vietnam.