Public Safety officials and Princeton Township Police are investigating a hate message targeting African Americans and Jews discovered Wednesday afternoon in an University office building.
A University employee found the message in a cellar room in the Office of the General Counsel at 120 Alexander St., University spokeswoman Marilyn Marks said. The employee reported the message to the administration, which immediately contacted Township Police, she added.
Marks declined to give the exact content of the message. "The reason for that is that we don't want to do anything to jeopardize the case," she said.
The message did not target a specific person, Marks said, noting that no one's name had been used.
The message had been written sometime between Oct. 5 and Wednesday, according to press reports.
Marks said she did not know how long the message had been there and that the cellar room did not receive "a lot of traffic."
"It was in a place that was seldom used," Marks said. "It was a place that would not have been seen by many people."
As soon as the message was seen, Marks noted, it was reported to authorities.
The University has strict policies regarding ethnicand race-based bias, she said.
"Princeton has strong policies relating to any kind of racial harassment and a policy that sets strong sanctions," she said.
As of Sunday, neither the University nor the police knew if a member of the University wrote the message, Marks said.
"Princeton has an open campus," she said. "So I just think that Princeton is not immune to all of the things that happen in the world."
A spokesperson for the Township Police could not be reached yesterday. Public Safety Lt. Lloyd Best declined to comment.
Marks said this type of incident "has happened occasionally at Princeton, just as it has happened everywhere else."
The Anti-Defamation League released a statement Friday denouncing the message.
"We have expressed our concern to the county prosecutor's office, the local police department and the administration at Princeton University," ADL regional director Charles Goldstein said. "We are pleased that this act of vandalism is being investigated as a bias crime. We trust that the perpetrator(s) will be apprehended and prosecuted to the full extent of the law."
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