Officials of a small Christian university say a life-size cardboard effigy of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was hung from a campus tree, suspended from a branch with fishing line around the neck.
George Fox University President Robin Baker says a custodian discovered the effigy early Tuesday and removed it.
"We will not tolerate such displays and condemn it in the strongest terms," he said.
The hanging of the effigy around the neck is seen as racist symbolism because it harkens back to lynchings of black men by white mobs, especially in the US South, decades ago.
Obama is aiming to become the country's first black president.
Administrators at the university, which was founded by Quaker pioneers in 1891, said on Wednesday that they do not know who hung it.
Few people saw the effigy or were aware of it, spokesman Rob Felton said Wednesday.
Taped to the commercially produced cardboard cutout of the black senator from Illinois was a message targeting participants in Act Six, a scholarship program geared toward increasing the number of minority and low-income students at several Christian colleges, mostly in the Northwest.
The message read, "Act Six reject."
The school has 17 students enrolled in the program, according to a release.
It said most are members of minority groups.
Students in the program receive full scholarships, according to school officials, and they are selected based on their leadership potential.
Felton said in the two decades he had been at the school he had "never experienced or heard of any type of overt racial act."
Local police were notified, and they will decide whether the act was a crime, he said.
Baker said in a statement that he met with the students in the Act Six program late Tuesday and planned to address the school's undergraduate student body Wednesday morning at the school's regular chapel service.
The school promotes diversity and is meant to reflect the "character of God," Baker said.
George Fox University is in Newberg, in the Willamette Valley south of Portland.
About 1,800 students are enrolled, and the school says nearly a quarter of its first-year undergraduate students are members of minority groups.
AP