If you thought a cock-eyed view of the Middle East was mainly a specialty of Columbia, you mightn’t have taken a walk recently down the hallway of the City University of New York graduate center. It features a one-sided exhibit that looked like it was propaganda from the regime of Saddam Hussein. It consists of reverential portraits of Iraqis – not Iraqis freed by Americans, but Iraqis killed by Americans. Absent are any Americans killed by the enemy, or any Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime or by the remnant of terrorists and Saddamists now blowing up restaurants and hospitals in Iraq.

This wasn’t engineered by some far-left student group or faction of off-campus agitators but was rather a class assignment. It wasn’t a class on propaganda or foreign policy but a photography class that somehow seems to have been turned to political ends. If this could happen to students in classrooms at CUNY, which is in the hands of a responsible management team led by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and his board of trustees, many of whom were appointed by Republican governors and mayors of New York, we can only shudder to imagine what is going on at other colleges around the county.

The Manhattan Institute’s Wriston Lecture last week was devoted to a speech by a conservative Princeton professor about how important it is to try to bring some sense onto college campuses. Lest one get discouraged, one can recall the film “Arguing the World,” about some radical leftist students at City College. Irving Kristol’s voyage from Trotskyist to neoconservative – and the similar maturation of his radical student colleagues, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer – is a reminder that exposure to campus leftism is often not the end but the beginning of a lifelong intellectual journey toward sense. So we are left with the hope that among the CUNY students erecting Baathist propaganda is another Glazer or Kristol or Bell who find, in the end, a moral compass.