This is a very disturbing story, to say the least. A black professor, Madonna Constantine, who teaches at Columbia University’s graduate education school, was notified by a colleague one day that a noose was hanging on her door. The New York City hate crimes task force is investigating.

The DOJ joins the New York City Police Department hate crimes task force in trying to determine who could have hung the 4-foot-long hangman’s rope on the doorknob of Madonna Constantine, a professor at the university’s graduate education school.

“The Department of Justice — including the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Civil Rights Division — has opened an investigation into this matter, and we will coordinate with the New York Police Department hate crimes task force, which is already investigating,” a source within the DOJ told FOXNews.com in an e-mail.

The noose was discovered Tuesday by one of Constantine’s colleagues. A police official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking at whether a fellow faculty member at Teachers College with whom Constantine had a dispute or an unhappy student might have been responsible.

A despicable act, for which police are pursuing an angle that one fellow professor had an ongoing feud with Constantine.

But there’s been an interesting twist in the whole situation. Columbia University possesses surveillance video that will most likely show who placed the noose on Professor Constantine’s door. So, why won’t Columbia release it to authorities?

Columbia University has refused to turn over security videotape that could help identify who hung a noose on a black professor’s office door, police said Thursday.

Investigators began asking on Wednesday for tapes from cameras in the building, but have been rebuffed by administrators, said Paul Browne, the New York Police Department’s top spokesman.

He said police will have to get a court order to force the school to provide video they believe could crack the case.

“It’s unfortunate because it adds a time-consuming step to the investigation,” Browne said.

Frankly, what is Columbia hiding? If it’s concerned about hate crimes on campus, why won’t it hand over the video that can solve the crime? Bryan sums it up:

That’s odd behavior, all things considered. If the perp is on the tape, and the university has the tape and wants the police to find the perp, you’d think that the university would hand over the tape. And if the perp isn’t on the tape, hand it over anyway so the police can rule that line of evidence out as quickly as possible. To not hand over the tape is, potentially, to protect a racist who is threatening one of the university’s professors.

And why would Columbia want to do that? Bollinger has already said it’s despicable. Why not release the one piece of evidence that could swiftly solve a racist, criminal act?