Like much of what Chomsky wrote, this is false. I'm reasonably well educated and spent 13 years on the faculty of FSU.
I first became interested in Chomsky for linguistics. He made some notable contributions, such as the Chomsky taxonomy of grammars and early work on generative grammars (without semantics). However, his transformational grammar, while fun to play with, is pretty much useless. He also had this fixation about language being uniquely human and innate.
So far, this is fine. People come up with good ideas and bad ideas. However, he worked so hard at creating a cult of Chomsky and going around being aggressive to people and using his status to put down other, more promising approaches like HPSG and deep case grammars.
He does the same thing with politics, and he lies not only about factual matters and what other people wrote but about things that he himself said and wrote. He uses his linguistic skills to weasel, but even clear statements he made he lies about later. Occasionally, he's right, but what he writes is usually ignorant, and he also has a penchant for fixating on minor sources that he happens to disagree with.
Even the most famous book that he only co-wrote, Manufacturing Consent, almost completely ignores the vast amount of work in media studies.
If anything, the "ignorant kids" comment applies more to his acolytes. He gives the impression of letting the reader on a great secret, oversimplified to produce a "ding-dong" effect. He does for the left what Ayn Rand did for the right. Rand was a wingnut. Chomsky is a moonbat.
Yeah I'm quite the irrational polemicist around here clearly 
