Two Columbia University students were arrested after allegedly defacing a dormitory suite with what the university’s president termed “hate speech.”

The students allegedly vandalized the suite with swastikas and racist and homophobic messages during a party that lasted deep into the morning, students living in the dormitory said.

An undergraduate resident in the dormitory, Ruggles Hall on 114th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, said female students who lived in the suite were divided over whether to notify security about the incident. One of the girls in the suite was “really offended,” the student said, while others did not want to turn in their friends.

On Monday, Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, sent a message to students assuring them that the university is a “diverse community marked by tolerance and mutual respect.” The university also dispatched members of its residential life staff to counsel students upset by what the university described as a “bias incident.”

Police charged the accused students with criminal mischief in connection with the defacement, Columbia officials said. The Columbia Spectator newspaper identified the students arrested as Stephen Searles, an engineering student, and Matthew Brown, a Columbia College student and a member of the fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, whose members are predominantly baseball players.

The university is considering taking disciplinary measures against the students, who could not be reached yesterday for comment.

“I think it’s retarded, and they should be criminally prosecuted,” a sophomore resident of the dormitory, Elizabeth Claire Burke, said.

Another resident, who did not want to be identified, said, “People were being drunk and stupid and not thinking about what they were doing.”

Columbia in recent months has investigated other cases of racist graffiti. Last academic year, someone etched a series of large swastikas on the stalls of a third-floor men’s bathroom at Columbia’s Butler Library.