A controversial author yesterday compared the treatment of conservatives on college campuses to a recent incident in which a black Columbia University professor was targeted with a noose hung on her office door.
“Nooses have been figuratively put on the doors of college Republicans,” conservative commentator and Columbia alum David Horowitz claimed in a speech at the Ivy League school.
The comment drew a few nervous chuckles during his lecture, but outrage afterward.
“We find it particularly reprehensible at this time, when our community is sensitive to these issues, that he would come into this place, his alma mater, and try to be divisive and tear us apart,” said Tiffany Dockery, president of Columbia’s Black Student Organization.
Horowitz has been a contentious figure at many of the college campuses he has visited during his self-proclaimed “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”
The California activist, famous for his ads in campus newspapers opposing slavery reparations, saved his most stunning comments for the recent campus incident in which a hangman’s noose was pinned to the door of Teachers College psychology and education professor Madonna Constantine.
“I detect somewhat of a double standard at this university and at others where I have spoken,” Horowitz said. “Nooses have been figuratively put on the doors of college Republicans. There’s always a noose placed, hanging over my head.”
The Class of ’59 alum also accused the school of becoming less tolerant.
“I was never singled out like conservative students are now,” said the communist-turned-neocon.
Horowitz, author of “Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom,” and other books, also outlined his views on the role of Muslim fundamentalists throughout history, emphasizing the current danger of a group of people “out to kill Americans.”
He said discussion of this subject has been “banished” from classrooms at Columbia and that the school hires only leftist professors while failing to employ teachers who might actually offer “diverse” ideas.
The audience’s tolerance was in stark contrast to an incident last year in which a posse of left-leaning students bum-rushed the stage during an appearance by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the border-patrolling Minutemen Project, forcing the cancellation of his scheduled speech.
* Teacher’s College at Columbia University has again become the focus of a NYPD hate crime probe after two Jewish professors were sent threatening racist rants, police said yesterday.
The professors received packages at their offices on West 120th Street that contained “anti-Zionist notes and letters,” officials said.
The teachers, who were not identified, discovered the hate mail Thursday.