A black professor at Columbia University's Teachers College has discovered a hangman's noose hanging on her office door in the latest in a series of copycat racist incidents across the United States.

The president of the New York education college, Susan H. Fuhrman, sent an e-mail yesterday to its 5,000 students and 150 faculty staff explaining why police had been called on to campus.

“The Teachers College community and I deplore this hateful act, which violates every Teachers College and societal norm,” the statement said.

The school has not identified the teacher, but a student newspaper named her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a psychology professor who has written widely about racism.

Nooses, reviled by many as symbols of lynchings in the Old South, have been in the news recently because of a case in Jena, Louisiana, where three white students hung nooses from a 'whites-only' oak tree outside a high school.

The three were suspended but not prosecuted. But racial tensions rose after a white student was beaten unconscious three months later and thousands of people later protested against the arrest for that attack of six black students – dubbed 'the Jena 6'.

Since that case there have been at least a dozen copycat incidents reported in American newspapers.

But the case at the Columbia Teachers College, the top-ranked teacher training school in the United States and a liberal stronghold, is seen as especially shocking. “You would think, Columbia being such a diverse campus and New York being such a diverse city, it shouldn’t happen here,” said Mikayla Graham, a Teachers College student.

The Columbia Spectator reported that 150 students gathered at the college last night to discuss the incident and there will be a "black-clad" student protest against it later today.

It said that the noose incident follows "a series of politically and racially charged events" in recent weeks, including a visit by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who shocked students by denying that there were any homosexuals in his country.

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