Given the degree to which both Columbia University and the New School are bases for the political left in New York City, it’s an illuminating development that both are honoring Senator McCain as part of their graduation ceremonies. At Columbia, President Bollinger voted against bringing ROTC back to campus. The 1968 commencement on Morningside Heights was marred by student protests against the Vietnam War. Yet Mr. McCain, a Vietnam War hero who has a daughter who is a Columbia junior, will deliver the keynote address at this spring’s Class Day ceremony on May 16, the university announced earlier this month. This is the same university that conservative activist David Horowitz denounced last month as an “ideological fortress” where nine of the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” teach.

Any conservative who has braved talking at the New School, meanwhile, can testify that its Greenwich Village campus seems to have a way of attracting Bush-haters to panel discussions, whether or not they have an affiliation with the school. A typical New School event was a recent one called “Politics of Resistance” in which Cornel West, Stanley Aronowitz, and Frances Fox Piven engaged in what was billed as “a critique of American foreign and domestic policy.” For all that, the school’s Web site says that among the honorary degree recipients at commencement May 19 will be the Republican senator from Arizona who is among the leading contenders for the 2008 presidential nomination. The same senator that the former paid Enron adviser who now writes a predictable anti-Bush column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, calls “a man of the hard right.”

Now, it may be that at commencement time universities have a tendency to veer away from the hard left, paying at least some heed to the sensitivities of the tuition-paying parents, who with age have become more moderate than their offspring. It may just be that Mr. McCain has a daughter at Columbia and is old Senate pals with the president of the New School, Robert Kerrey, who holds, for his courage in Vietnam, the Medal of Honor, which is impossible to alloy.

We have our issues with Mr. McCain, mainly in respect of the legislation he has championed to protect incumbent politicians and water-down the First Amendment by restricting campaign speech. But Mr. McCain is a pro-life, pro-war supporter of marginal tax cuts. If he is made to feel welcome at Morningside Heights and in Greenwich Village by the students and faculty as well as the administrations, there may just be some hope that Mr. McCain’s ideas can be debated respectfully and with open minds on these campuses more than just one day a year.