It is this academic credibility which earned him the kind of fawning respect from people who should know better. He is no Abbie Hoffman - he is a well-published PhD.
It's interesting that academics who disagree with his linguistic research and the "Minimalist Program" that he has articulated to support it, are frightened to challenge his linguistic work because they know his political influence on campus may hurt their careers.
At the university I attended back in the '70s I actually saw the opposite happening. At that time, Chomsky's "Generative Syntax" theory was being replaced by "Generative Semantics". I was minoring in theoretical linguistics at the time and remember my professors complaining that Chomsky was fighting against any theories that were an improvement on his own.
didn't you know? being a cunning linguist makes you a foreign policy expert! these same profs should want WF Buckley to be our national security advisor.
Chomsky is a classic example of a pernicious and improper appeal to the authority of a person outside their field of authority. Another classic example is when Roger Penrose tries to wax eloquent about his theories of artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, this nasty fallacy is a chronic participant in many of the threads on FreeRepublic e.g. in the crevo and science discussions. Being an authority in one field does not confer authority in all possible fields no matter how smart that authority nominally is. Humans do love their idolatry.