(CNN) A faculty member at Harvard University walked up to her office to find a note on the door insulting her ethnicity and immigration status, according to university officials.

The woman was walking with a group of graduate students Thursday when she saw the obscene, hateful note that "challenged her right to be at Harvard and wished her ill," Harvard's statement said.

The university did not identify the faculty member.

"We condemn this hateful act and all forms of hate speech," Harvard President Lawrence Bacow and Dean Claudine Gay wrote in a joint letter to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences community.

"Attacks of this kind are both personally damaging for those who experience them and an assault on our faculty's fundamental commitments to academic excellence," Bacow and Gay wrote. "Acts of bigotry and malice harm us all because they corrode the trust and respect that is essential to the open exchange of ideas."

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