The trustees of the City University of New York meet Monday afternoon. It would be a good opportunity for them to set in motion some changes that would restore public confidence in an institution whose reputation is becoming increasingly tarnished.

It’s possible the CUNY trustees aren’t getting adequate reports from the university administration, so let’s just review the state of play. At City College in Harlem, a student-government-funded newspaper last year published a photograph that portrays a man’s underarm hair shaped like the state of Israel. The “artist” responsible for this work explains to the paper that Israel “has enough arms to bring down half (or more) of this planet,” and that “Israeli citizens are branded for life.” And the artist turns out to be not some student agitator but an actual taxpayer-paid teacher at City College, whose course is called “The Artist as Activist.”

At the newly renovated CUNY Graduate Center at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies has mounted in the first-floor lobby an exhibit of photographs from Cuba between 1992 and 2002. They portray the Communist island in a gauzy light. One photo shows four smiling women in colorful hoop dresses at an “Anti-U.S. Economic Embargo Parade.” Another image, titled “Revered Leader,” shows an elderly woman posing in her home with a framed portrait of a young Fidel Castro.

At Brooklyn College, meanwhile, administrators reacting to the dispute over a denial of tenure to historian Robert David “K.C.” Johnson are in a defensive crouch. Brooklyn’s provost, Roberta Matthews, sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal asserting that she is “proud” of “our distinguished chair of the History Department.” In a 30-year career in academia, the chairman, Philip F. Gallagher, has a record of scholarship that consists, so far as we can tell, of writing the introduction to a volume of essays, none of which he authored. In the classroom, the chairman received a teaching evaluation score of 2.5 on a four-point scale, 24.8% lower than the next-lowest-ranked member of the department, and a full 42.4% below the department average, according to figures compiled by the student government. When The New York Sun inquired of Ms. Matthews about exactly what made Professor Gallagher “distinguished,” the answer we got back from the college’s public relations woman was that the provost considers all of the college’s chairmen to be distinguished.

One of the historians whom Mr. Gallagher joined in leading the charge against Professor Johnson, Bonnie Anderson, maintains a Web site in which she declares that she “combines writing with activism” and she “continues to march for … assorted radical causes.” No wonder Mr. Gallagher had called her an “academic terrorist”; in Professor Johnson’s case, Ms. Anderson seems to be activating at the expense of merit in the CUNY tenure process.

We don’t mean to single out CUNY or to impose our own political views on its faculty or art exhibits. Unfortunately, anti-Israelism, anti-Americanism, political correctness, and tenured radicals run rampant today on many American campuses, public and private. Today, the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University kicks off “Dreams of a Nation,” a “Palestinian film festival” that is being promoted with a map depicting all of Israel in the red and green colors of the PLO flag, a formula that means death to millions of individuals because they are Jews.

But it is CUNY that is taxpayer-funded, to the tune of more than $1 billion a year, at a moment when both the city and state of New York are facing severe financial pressures. CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, and the trustees we’ve talked to seem genuinely interested in raising the university’s academic standards. They don’t seem interested in using the university as a platform for anti-Israel, pro-Communist, or “radical” propaganda.

Professor Johnson’s troubles at Brooklyn started when he took a stand for standards in a search that seem rigged to find a woman and when he pointed out that a college-sponsored forum on terrorism included no speakers supporting American or Israeli policy. Fixing CUNY will require not just rectifying Mr. Johnson’s case but swiftly taking concrete measures to change the Brooklyn College history department and the atmosphere in the university as a whole. It will take nothing less to assure that young professors who are outstanding scholars and teachers will choose careers at CUNY, rather than shying away because they know they will have to devote their energy there to wrestling in the swamp with the radical rapscallions.