GRANVILLE- Nooses on a poster advertising a Halloween singing concert set off two weeks of debate and protest at Denison University, a largely white liberal arts campus.

The college choir, which had invited students to “come hang with us,” removed the posters, canceled the concert and turned the event into a forum on discrimination.

Some students say the ad was the last straw and exposed an ugly side to this expensive university situated in a quaint central Ohio town.

“It was like enough is enough,” said Romero Huffstead, a senior and chief minister of the Black Student Union.

Black students complained about ongoing cases of racial slurs and graffiti and racially tinged harassment. Gay and lesbian students complained of slurs and anti-gay graffiti.

The controversy followed the discovery of nooses elsewhere around the country, including the University of Maryland and Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.

The same week the flier appeared at Denison, student complaints at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, prompted police to take down a student art display consisting of seven nooses and a tire swing hung from a tree. University officials said the artists apparently did not intend to be racist.

The Denison campus of about 2,100 students has about a hundred black students and smaller numbers of Hispanic and Asian students.