Police are investigating a third suspected hate crime at New York's Columbia University after a swastika was spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish faculty member on Wednesday.
The university said in a statement that the swastika was spray-painted on the door of a Jewish faculty member at Teachers' College on Wednesday.
Police said they were investigating the incident but declined further comment.
"We feel we've been targeted precisely because Teachers College is, and historically has been, a center for deep multicultural work," Susan Furhman, the president of Teachers College, said in a statement.
Columbia's Teachers College, part of the university campus in upper Manhattan, houses the nation's oldest and largest graduate school of education.
New York City is known for its racial and ethnic diversity, and the suspected hate crimes follow recent national attention and protests in Jena, Louisiana, where three nooses were found hanging from a tree at a high school there last year.
Other suspected hate crimes
A black professor discovered a noose outside her Teachers College office on Oct. 10. The next day a caricature of a man wearing a yarmulke above a swastika was found on a bathroom door at the School of General Studies.
The Columbia incidents earlier this month sparked a campus protest and a separate forum in which students aired grievances about racial incidents.
A spate of crimes followed in New York City in which blacks and Jews were harassed with swastikas and nooses, leading police to believe it was the work of copycats.
Nooses are seen as a potent symbol of racist lynchings and hatred of blacks in the United States.
