In trying to help put the Iraqi educational system back together in 2003-04, educator John Agresto, Ph.D. '74, soon discovered that growing religious fanaticism among students, constant violence and the murder or fearful resignation of numerous professors made his task nearly impossible.

Agresto, former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M., and author of the book "Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions," spent 10 months as the senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq.

On April 17 he lectured in Cornell's Rockefeller Hall about his experiences and the influence they had on his ideas about democracy.

"I kept noting," said Agresto, "we went armed with little more than slogans, slogans about the freedom of democracy, but it's not democracy in and of itself that contributes to the stability of this world; it's the moderate, mild, middle-class and liberal democracies. If we failed in Iraq, it was a failure not of this or that policy but a failure to understand the enormous task of bringing freedom to so broken and shattered a country."

Agresto lived in a small trailer inside Baghdad's Green Zone, working with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi government to help a higher education system struggling to get back on its feet after most of its facilities had been bombed, burned or looted.

"I went to Iraq, and so did every other American civilian I met, first to help the Iraqis," he said. "We went there to help them rebuild their system of higher education We went to help them set up clinics, build new hospitals, fix their infrastructure, rebuild their banking system, reopen grade schools, raise up their teachers. We all volunteered to go there, despite the inconvenience, the oppressive heat and the obvious dangers, to do something that could only on one level be described as humanitarian."

Agresto made frequent visits to universities throughout Baghdad to find ways to support the organizations that had served as havens for the liberal, middle-class population essential to create and stabilize a successful democracy.

Since leaving the country in 2004, Agresto has remained involved with the Iraqi university system as a member of the board of trustees of the American University of Iraq in Sulaimaniya.