Report of Attack Rattles Princeton

UPDATE: Princeton Student Said To Have Staged Attack

PRINCETON, N.J. — An alleged physical attack on a Princeton University student who is leading a movement to instill conservative moral values among undergraduates is rattling the campus here.

A politics major from Texas who is a junior, Francisco Nava, said he was physically attacked Friday, beaten, and rendered unconscious by two black-clad men about two miles from campus, he told the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in an interview.

The rare incidence of violence within the Ivy League prompted an outcry from conservative students and faculty who said they felt singled out by the Princeton administration and the majority of the student body, who remained silent in the face of what looked to many like a politically charged attack.

But the disclosure today that Mr. Nava fabricated a death threat against himself and his roommate when he was a high school student at the Groton School, has some students questioning his account of the last week's attack as well as the series of death threats he said he received this semester after airing his morally conservative views.

In high school, Mr. Nava wrote a death threat using an anti-homosexual slur, the Web site Firstthings.com reported this morning. Mr. Nava's roommate at Groton was a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance, according to the Web site.

"Evidently he did it once when he was a student at the Groton School," a professor of jurisprudence, Robert George, confirmed to The New York Sun. Several students at Princeton said yesterday that they did not want to pass any judgment on the situation without more information.

"Those of us who saw him at the emergency room find it difficult to believe he could have done this himself. The physical manifestations were too evident, too severe," Mr. George said. Mr. Nava earlier had told Mr. George about the incident at Groton, but denied that he sent the death threats at Princeton, or that he fabricated the attack, Mr. George said.

Mr. Nava told the student paper that the two men pinned him against a wall, repeatedly bashed his head against the bricks, and told him to shut up. Mr. Nava told the student paper that the assailants did not steal his wallet, credit cards, or cell phone.

No suspects had been identified yesterday, and the Princeton Township Police Department said it would not comment on the pending investigation.

The attack came two days after Mr. Nava, a leader of the Anscombe Society, a morally conservative student group that speaks out against same-sex marriage and pre-marital sex, received death threats via e-mail. Three other Anscombe leaders and a conservative professor also received the threats.

A Princeton senior who received the e-mail death threats, Sherif Girgis, said initially it didn't concern him. "I thought this threat would go the way 99.9% of them go — which is not beyond e-mail," he said. The text of the e-mail included an expletive, addressed every recipient by his first name, and threatened to "destroy" them. One e-mail used the word "kill."

Two days after the e-mail incident, the Anscombe Society's adviser, Mr. George, called Mr. Girgis to alert him that Mr. Nava had been attacked and was recovering in the emergency room.

Over the weekend, Mr. Nava's jaw was badly swollen, his face was covered with cuts and abrasions, and the inside of his mouth was bleeding, Mr. George, who was also a target of the death threats, said after visiting Mr. Nava in the emergency room.

Mr. Nava was moved over the weekend to the McCosh Health Center on campus.

Yesterday, a line of solemn-looking students, including Mr. Nava's girlfriend, stood outside his room while a nurse allowed two police officers to enter. The nurse eventually turned the friends and this reporter away, and said too many visitors were creating a disruptive atmosphere.

With an active Republicans Club, a pro-life club, three major Evangelical groups, and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions that is led by Professor George, Princeton University is considered one of the Ivy League's more conservative campuses.

But many conservative students at Princeton say they were being singled out for expressing unpopular views.

"There would rightly be outrage had the student been part of some other minority on campus," said a 2006 Princeton graduate who works at a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., Michael Fragoso. "I have yet to see that right now, and that's rather disappointing."

"Are there double standards and reforms that need to be made? Absolutely," Mr. George said in an interview.

A senior at Princeton, Stephen Hsia, wrote in a column for the student newspaper that more upsetting than a late reaction from the administration was the lack of student reaction. "The reaction of the student body has been noticeably silent," Mr. Hsia wrote.

The atmosphere on campus yesterday was calm, as students filed by twos and threes into the library to prepare for their end-of-semester exams. Many students eating lunch at the Frist Campus Center yesterday said they had not heard about the incident at all, and that staging protests was not part of the culture on campus.

Mr. Nava, a Mormon, attracted attention earlier this year after penning a guest column in the student newspaper criticizing Princeton's campaign to distribute free condoms on campus as a "tacit sponsorship of hookup sex."

He began receiving threatening letters and e-mails after the column ran, student sources said.

The president of Princeton's senior class, Thomas Haine, yesterday called the university's reaction to the initial death threats received by Mr. Nava "unacceptable."

"To my knowledge, no one from the university ever contacted Nava about several reported death threats," Mr. Haine said.

Princeton's Anscombe Society has been meeting with administrators regularly to discuss its concerns about the treatment of conservative students on campus.

Administrators agreed that a sex-education skit that students act out during freshman orientation, "Sex on a Saturday Night," will be modified to include an abstinent character, Anscombe leaders said.

The group is also working with abstinence groups at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The co-president of a loosely affiliated Harvard group, Leo Keliher, said students are mulling a conference this spring to bring together morally conservative groups from many different college campuses.

Some students yesterday said they the incident would not intimidate them into silence.

"An assault on those who express their opinion hurts all of us who might want to express their views. If you have a problem with what I say, then come and get me," a sophomore who is a member of the Princeton College Republicans, Wyatt Yankus, wrote on a blog, Princetontory.blogspot.com.

"It's a terrible incident, but it doesn't surprise me," a conservative author who has campaigned against a culture of left-wing conformity on college campuses, David Horowitz, said in an interview. "The left has now become the hate group."

A conservative professor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, said he is outraged. "I hope Princeton comes down on them like a ton of bricks, and by Princeton I mean either the university or the township or both," Mr. Mansfield said. "It should be easy for liberals to identify a case of intolerance; they're good at that."

A spokeswoman for Princeton, Cass Cliatt, said the university does not comment on situations involving students when they are off campus. "This is the township's investigation," she wrote in an e-mail.

Public safety officials have told the threatened students that they are patrolling the grounds around their dormitories, Mr. Girgis said.