The New York Post reports:

A swastika was found today spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish professor at Teachers College who studies the Holocaust and vehemently opposed the visit to the Columbia campus by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cops said.

The reviled image, painted in brown, was discovered at 9:30 a.m. on the office door of Dr. Elizabeth Midlarsky, 66, co-chairwoman of the counseling and clinical psychology department at the college.

As Prof. Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma has found in his research on the academic community’s response to Hitler in the 1930s, Columbia was not the only prominent U.S. university to behave shamefully with regard to the Nazis. Harvard hosted a visit by Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. American University chancellor Joseph Gray visited and praised Nazi Germany. MIT Dean Harold Lobdell personally tore down posters for a rally against a Nazi warship docked in Boston’s harbor, and MIT participated in a 1937 celebration at the Nazi-controlled University of Goettingen. Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, and others continued student exchanges with Nazi Germany into the late 1930s, and more than twenty U.S. colleges and universities took part in the 1936 Heidelberg event.

But Columbia is unique in one important respect. Its administration alone seems to have learned so little from the mistakes of the 1930s that it is prepared to welcome the leader of yet another antisemitic, terrorist regime.