Swastika Is Found At Columbia

A Columbia University Teachers College professor who researches the Holocaust found a swastika painted on her office door yesterday morning, less than a month after a black professor found a noose hanging from her doorknob in the same building.

The professor, Elizabeth Midlarsky, who is Jewish, said in an interview that she felt "awful" that she was targeted, noting that recently she has been "more public about my work on the Holocaust."

"I think there's a very hate-filled person who is an extreme coward," she said. "It makes my blood run cold."

Ms. Midlarsky is a psychologist who has researched topics ranging from altruism to violence and mental health. She also has written several papers about heroic rescues during the Holocaust and about genocide in Europe.

A student in one of her classes, Marie Wyatt, expressed surprise that Ms. Midlarsky was targeted. "I can't imagine anything this person has done to bring it upon" herself, Ms. Wyatt said.

The president of the Teachers College, Susan Fuhrman, immediately condemned the incident in an e-mailed statement to students and faculty, calling it "a serious hate crime."

"We feel we've been targeted precisely because Teachers College is and historically has been a center for deep multi-cultural work. We are committed to maintaining that tradition by operating as an open, tolerant community," she said.

The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, said in a statement that he joined Ms. Fuhrman "in abhorring these anonymous acts," noting, as she did, that he believed that broadcasting the incidents was unhelpful because it could fuel future acts.

Teachers College is affiliated with Columbia University and bills itself as the largest and oldest graduate school of education in the country. It has a faculty that is 21% minority and offers more than 30 classes about multicultural issues. After a noose was found hanging on the door of a Teachers College professor, Madonna Constantine, who is black, Ms. Fuhrman suggested that the number of classes would be expanded and that the school would push to hire more minority professors.

A few days after the first Teachers College incident, a swastika was found in the bathroom of another Columbia University building. Four other nooses have been found around the city in recent weeks, and anti-Semitic graffiti has been discovered in two public high schools.

Police have attributed the incidents to copycats.

The noose incident led to protests and also a public flap with the police department after Teachers College administrators declined to turn over surveillance video to detectives without a court order.

Police officials said the Hate Crime Taskforce was investigating the latest incident. A spokesman for the police department, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said the Teachers College was cooperating but is "still requiring us to get a subpoena" for the footage.

Today, City Council members, the five borough presidents, and leaders of civil rights organizations are holding a rally in response to the incidents. Also today, the City Council is considering a bill to create a penalty for bias-motivated graffiti. Violators would be fined between $10,000 and $25,000.