The bells chime at noon in Harvard Square. Graduate students, professors, and college staff members bustle down Cambridge Street. A group of teen German tourists stand outside Memorial Hall, oblivious to the building’s significance.

Inside the hall, it is lunchtime. A solemn staffer stands sentry as Harvard’s first-year students grab their trays and take their lunch. On the walls of the Memorial Transept are inscribed the names of members of old familiar Boston families slain during the Civil War for the Union cause. There is Samuel Storrow, class of 1864, who gave his life at the Battle of Averysboro. One can find James Samuel Wadsworth, class of 1828, who fell at the Battle of the Wilderness, and Robert Gould Shaw, class of 1860, immortalized as the commander of the African-American 54th Regiment in the film “Glory.” Finally, among the more than 136 names, stands Sumner Paine, who failed to graduate in 1865. He matriculated at the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863.

Harvard alumni constructed Memorial Hall in the wake of the Civil War to honor the bravery of fellow graduates who fought that war. An overt act of patriotism of this kind from an elite American university would be unthinkable today. Today’s universities are more likely to be bastions of moral equivalence and Blame America Firsters. That is not to suggest, however, that our military is bereft of participation from the country’s educated elite. Whatever the intention behind Senator Kerry’s ill-advised comments last week regarding those serving in Iraq, the lawmaker from Massachusetts nonetheless thrust the issue of our finest university students and the military into the limelight.

Even as our military has taken fire on elite campuses, a counterintuitive and little-noticed trend among those institutions has emerged. Graduates of America’s best colleges are joining the service for a variety of reasons. While the percentages of those choosing to serve are not, by any means, what they were in the days of Colonel Shaw, a considerable portion of the American student body believes in serving its country in time of war. It is in the salons of the anti-war, baby-boomer left, where the military is the degraded, unqualified force it was in the waning days of the draft.

Consider the example of First Lieutenant Joseph Kearns Goodwin. Lieutenant Goodwin, the son of President Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, was awarded a Harvard degree in 2001. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he joined the Army and was commissioned as an officer. He spent a year leading men in Iraq, and the Army awarded him a Bronze Star. Upon his return in 2004, the Boston Red Sox — whose on-the-field activities captured his attention while he was overseas — invited him to throw out the first pitch. “As I limped to the mound on that glorious evening, my right leg in a brace after surgery for injuries I had sustained in Iraq, I was as nervous as I had been on nightly patrols in Baghdad,” Lieutenant Goodwin recounted in Boston Magazine. “It was … on that evening at Fenway that I finally came to realize I was home and that the trials of war were behind me.”

Retired Captain Paul Mawn graduated from Harvard in 1963 and joined the Navy. Today he lives outside Boston — not far from where Lieutenant Goodwin grew up — and is chairman of the Advocates for Harvard ROTC. The group was formed to “promote a climate of tolerance and acceptance for those who believe in serving their country.” His son attended Dartmouth College and opted for the Marines Corps, where he served in the elite Force Recon unit. “There’s been a long sense of tradition,” he says, speaking of Harvard.

Harvard participants in ROTC become members of the Paul Revere Battalion along with students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts, Wellesley, and three other schools. Enrollment in the Paul Revere Battalion, based at MIT, has grown 40% during the last year and a half. Some 18 months ago, there were 39 cadets; now the number is roughly 55. Seven Harvard seniors were commissioned on campus in 2005. The prior year the number was 10.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Harvard has touched from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli and to the sands of Iraq. “Harvard is overrepresented in the Marine Corps,” says Bing West, who graduated from Georgetown and Princeton and led Marines in Vietnam. Mr. West points out that Harvard’s presence is all the more remarkable given the exponential growth of American colleges and universities since the Civil War. “The great irony about all this is the reason people [question] the Ivy League’s doing their share is that the bases of colleges has enlarged.”

On a gray Cambridge day in early November, thoughts of Iraq are far away. A young woman, dressed as a chorus girl, distributes handbills for a showing of “The Chorus Line.” An athlete wearing Harvard sweats lopes into Memorial Hall for lunch. The mood here, like in most of America (particularly among young people finding their way during the first weeks of college), is of myopia. If the fate of our troops is not at the forefront, neither is the reflexive anti-war rage that is prevalent on the Web. A pair of students — both uncertain about what their concentrations, or majors, will be — regale me on the history of Memorial Hall and Memorial Church. One, Cliff, a resident of Scarsdale, N.Y., reports considerable interest in ROTC on the part of his classmates. He recoils at the suggestion that those serving in Iraq are there because they are uneducated and unlucky. “Certainly not the majority,” he says.

With the all-volunteer Army now going into its fourth decade, military leaders have finally discarded recruiting efforts that portray the Army as a fancy trade school. The Army is following the lead of the Marine Corps, which never has trouble finding recruits. The new Army marketing campaign is “Army Strong.” It sells honor, courage, tradition, and duty. Storrow, Wadsworth, and, above all, Shaw exemplified these values during the Civil War. A new generation serves today for the same reasons.

Mr. Gitell (www.gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.