A person reading press coverage of the young volunteers and staff on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign or the anti-war group Moveon.org could be forgiven for ending up with the impression that the students on America’s campuses today are a bunch of radicals who oppose the war in Iraq. No one would have gained such an impression from Sunday’s commencement exercises at Dartmouth College, where the speaker was Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and chief executive of General Electric Company.

Mr. Immelt’s company was the eighth largest defense contractor last year, winning a total of $2.8 billion in work from the Pentagon. He was greeted with warm applause from the Dartmouth students, and there were no visible protests. Some may try to relive the past by projecting their own Vietnam-era anti-war rebelliousness onto today’s youth. The indications at Dartmouth were that it isn’t so. Admittedly, Dartmouth isn’t the University of California at Berkeley. But it isn’t Hillsdale College, either. And it isn’t necessarily an exception to the rule. As David Brooks writes in his illuminating new book “On Paradise Drive,” “Today’s college students, by and large, are not trying to buck the system; they’re trying to climb it.” Mr. Brooks writes, “The faculty at most schools is significantly to the left of the students.”

Mr. Immelt, a 1978 graduate of Dartmouth, was honored Sunday with a doctor of laws degree. He made light of the fact that some students had told the school newspaper that they would have preferred Secretary of State Powell as a commencement speaker. He spoke of his experience on September 11, when “planes with our engines hit buildings we insured, covered by a network we owned.”He encouraged the graduates to learn every day, work hard, to “be a giver” and to “be an optimist.” He said: “Cynicism is corrosive.” It was one point, at least, on which the best of the baby boomers and the best of the GE generation can agree..