The city parks department made the right decision in throwing an exhibit of “art” from Brooklyn College out of a war memorial at Cadman Plaza park. The art consists of gross sexually explicit imagines that were completely inappropriate for mounting inside one of the most hallowed public places in the city. We don’t know what Brooklyn College was thinking, if it was thinking, when it allowed its students to pull such a stunt. And it’s hard to imagine what Brooklyn College was thinking, if it was thinking, when it agreed to take the “art” back.

The college’s statement announcing it would take back the works came from its provost, Roberta Matthews. The college’s president, Christoph Kimmich, is an earnest educator who has insisted to us over the years that Brooklyn is a success story. When we have pointed to problems there, Brooklyn’s allies have accused us of singling out the campus for criticism. Ms. Matthews, a veteran of LaGuardia Community College who famously wrote that “teaching is a political act,” issued a statement saying she was “proud” to display the student work, and interpreting the issue as a matter of “freedom of artistic expression.”

The “art” in question, now viewable on Brooklyn College’s taxpayer funded Web site, includes a painting of a man’s hand gripping his penis, part of series of explicit paintings, including one describing, in words and images, an imaginary homosexual encounter with the sitting vice president of the United States, complete with a pun on the vice president’s name. If this is the art of which Ms. Matthews is “proud,” someone should tell the taxpayers who are funding the institution that encourages this kind of thing with a degree called a “master of fine arts.”

This is the same Brooklyn College that tried to elevate one Timothy Shortell to be chairman of its sociology department after he wrote that “those who are religious are incapable of moral action” and described the faithful as “moral retards.” By the time Mr. Kimmich called off that promotion, the damage had been done. And that’s the context in which the art exhibit is seen, another case that calls for an intervention by either Mr. Kimmich or his superiors at the City University of New York central administration. At press time a lawyer for the students, Norman Siegel, was threatening to sue, and there were reports the art might be moved to a private gallery.

Some of the art in question can be viewed on various taxpayer-funded Web sites, such as http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/art/MFA%20Thesis/carl.htm. We invite our legislators to go up on the Web and take a look at it and think about whether this is what they want to be doing with the public fisc at a time when the taxpayers in this city and state are staggering under the heaviest tax burden in the nation. And also to think about whether the issue here is really the law or the private sector or whether the issue is about academic standards at a university that claims to be in favor of raising them.