More than 200 black-clad students, faculty, elected officials, and community members staged a rowdy protest in front of Columbia University’s Teachers College yesterday afternoon, vowing to take a “zero tolerance” attitude toward what they described as a growing climate of hate on campus after a noose was discovered Tuesday hanging on the office door of a black professor.
“Even in the Ivy League towers, at Columbia University in 2007, we might as well be in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1809,” state Senator Bill Perkins, a Democrat of Harlem, said at the protest outside the Arthur Zankel Building. Early Tuesday morning, a professor at the Teachers College found 4 feet of twine fashioned into a noose hanging on the door of the office of Madonna Constantine, a professor of psychology and education who has written extensively on racism.
“Hanging the noose on my door reeks of cowardice and fear on many, many levels,” Ms. Constantine said at the protest yesterday, drawing cheers from the crowd. “I would like the perpetrator to know I will not be silent.”
Judith Jacobsen, a professor at Columbia and the co-chairwoman of a group that fights anti-Semitism through academia, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, said she received e-mail messages from faculty members yesterday drawing a link between the noose incident and the recent visit to campus by President Ahmadinejad of Iran. “A lot of people are still churning inside about the Ahmadinejad event. It’s like post-traumatic stress disorder – another incident makes it all come back,” Ms. Jacobsen said.
The commanding officer of the police department’s hate crimes task force, Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood, said no hate crimes have been reported on Columbia’s campus since Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit. Earlier this month, racist graffiti was found scrawled in a bathroom stall at the School of International and Public Affairs.
Police officials, who have not yet identified a suspect, said they are planning to speak to every professor who works in Ms. Constantine’s department. Press reports yesterday said the incident may have been carried out by a rival professor.
There was no evidence to support speculation on campus that Ms. Constantine had placed the noose on her office door herself, police officials said.
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday called the incident “despicable.” Many students and faculty on campus yesterday said they were saddened but not surprised by the racist incident, and placed the blame on the university’s administration. The administration’s silence “sends the message to those who seek to undermine our community that such actions are acceptable,” the president of the Black Students Association at Columbia, Tiffany Dockery, said. She said the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, failed to address the incident Tuesday night. Yesterday, Mr. Bollinger met with the Columbia community at a town hall meeting to discuss it.
“An attack on the dignity of any member of our community is an assault on all of us,” Mr. Bollinger said in a statement.
The noose at Columbia was the second found in the city this week. A Queens woman was arrested on Sunday for hanging a noose from a tree in her backyard.
