‘Many People Are Seeing Different Facts’: Carnegie Mellon Official’s Emails on Election Spark Outcry

Doubts about the validity of the 2020 presidential election emerged in an unlikely place late last week — the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Many people are seeing different facts and parts of the story about what happened in each state,” wrote Kiron K. Skinner, the institute’s director and a professor, on Thursday to colleagues. “In many cases, there simply isn’t just one set of facts. A research project for some group of us would be to investigate on our own the election outcome in a handful of states. We could be surprised at what we find.”

Skinner, who served on President Trump’s transition team and worked in his administration in the State Department, sent this email and others just one day after a violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol, spurred on by Trump and right-wing provocateurs falsely alleging election fraud. Her messages — sent to, by some estimates, at least 100 colleagues — at times appeared to express sympathy to those who supported these ideas.

Carnegie Mellon is far from alone in employing or hosting current and former lawmakers and appointees, who often teach at colleges as fellows or visiting professors. President-elect Joe Biden is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

But Trump officials have brought sharp criticism when they come to colleges, in part because of the president’s propensity for lying and campuses’ stated missions to seek truth. Marc Short, Trump’s former legislative-affairs director, served as a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Multiple people left the center in protest of his hire. Harvard University hosted several Trump officials, including the former press secretary Sean Spicer, as fellows.

The stakes of such appointments are perhaps even higher after Wednesday, when the president incited his supporters with lies undercutting the validity of the election. The controversy at Carnegie Mellon suggests as much. As social-media platforms and corporations break ties with Trump and his enablers, colleges may find hiring officials from his administration to be both too controversial and too compromising.

The controversy began when Skinner’s institute published a news release about Richard Grenell, a Trump appointee halfway into his year as a senior fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Politics and Strategy. Grenell, who was hired by Skinner, has used his Twitter account to spread dismissed claims about election fraud. The release publicized two recent recognitions Grenell received from Trump. It was dated Wednesday, the day rioters broke into the Capitol.

Several people at the university expressed disgust over the timing of the announcement. “Academic freedom is important, but you’re trumpeting evil,” wrote David Andersen, a computer-science professor, on Twitter.

One professor emailed his concerns to a large group that included top administrators, his department’s faculty members, and some students. The university’s president, Farnam Jahanian, replied, saying to colleagues that he shared their concerns and had urged the Institute for Politics and Strategy to remove the post.

“In light of what unfolded in our nation’s capital,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Chronicle, “I understand how this post was offensive to members of our community.”

A back-and-forth discussion then erupted on the email chain. Many of the messages were subsequently posted to Reddit and Facebook, with senders’ names removed. The Chronicle also obtained the entirety of several of the emails independently. Several people affiliated with the Institute for Politics and Strategy declined to comment when contacted by a reporter.

Skinner, responding to Jahanian as well as the wider list, conceded that she made “process fouls” on the timing of the release. But she would not say that Trump lost the presidential election when a professor pressed her to do so. She urged professors to “investigate” the outcomes. And she raised President Richard Nixon’s 1960 election loss as an example of fraud happening “in all elections.” (Allegations of fraud in Illinois and Texas, two key disputed states in that race, were unsubstantiated.)

“What I am trying to humbly convey, but perhaps not so well, by email is that many people are seeing different facts and parts of the story about what happened in each state,” Skinner wrote in one email when presented with a false claim by Grenell.

“There is just one set of facts,” one person retorted in an email that was posted to Reddit. “We all collectively occupy one objective reality. The mission of a university is to establish these facts, via the scientific method.”

On Sunday Skinner wrote that she agreed with that statement. “In the end, science will prevail in helping us understand American politics in 2020. It will just take some time.”

In an interview, she explained the comment on multiple sets of facts by saying she was writing quickly and wanted to urge further research to find the “more nuanced story,” later clarifying that she was not contesting the election. When asked by The Chronicle if she believed Biden won the 2020 presidential election, she spoke for several minutes before saying he did. She said she didn’t respond to the professors’ questions on that subject online “because I didn’t think it was appropriate to the conversation. One of the principles of American elections is the secret ballot.” (In no email reviewed by The Chronicle did a professor ask how she voted.)

Skinner clarified that she should have gotten the university’s blessing on the news release, which was written days in advance and, according to her deputy director, was published at around 2 p.m. Wednesday. The crowd pushed past the Capitol Police at around 1:30 p.m. that day, The Washington Post reported.

Skinner, who has previously served as a faculty member in the history and social and decision sciences departments at Carnegie Mellon, worked in the State Department between 2018 and 2019. The New York Times reported that she was fired.

She said in a statement last summer that she invited Grenell to the fellowship “in the spirit of intellectual freedom.” Since his appointment, Grenell has posted a misleading photo of Biden on an airplane without a mask, taken before the Covid-19 pandemic, and he called Covid-19 the “Chinese flu.”

Grenell, who did not respond to a message on Sunday seeking comment, called the mob on Wednesday “completely unacceptable” on Twitter.

Research universities like Carnegie Mellon often seek connections with powerful external institutions, hiring from agencies like the National Science Foundation, corporations, or government, said Barrett Taylor, an associate professor at the University of North Texas who studies power in higher education. “The assumption of a lot of people in higher education is that that will help us stabilize those relationships.”

But political appointees in this “volatile” moment may not do much good — and they could erode public confidence in colleges, he said. It signals that colleges “want someone who has the phone number of someone,” rather than a hire who has long been an advocate for universities’ missions.

Hiring from the Trump administration could be especially fraught, given the amount of misinformation officials have spread as well as officials’ stances on racial-justice issues, he said.

On Monday, in a statement to The Chronicle, a Carnegie Mellon spokesperson attributed the “violent attack” in D.C. to “those who cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election through persistent and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, especially those who continue to do so now that the election has been certified.” The spokesperson, Jason Maderer, wrote that the university condemns “speech that incites violence.”

Skinner told The Chronicle that she had “no evidence” that Grenell’s false statements on election fraud moved rioters to the Capitol. “He has nothing like the follower base of Trump,” she said.

More than 1,500 people signed a petition urging that Grenell’s appointment, announced over the summer, be rescinded. A campus committee affirmed that Skinner had authority to appoint him despite a hiring freeze, because the funding for the position came from gifts. Committee members did acknowledge problems with Grenell’s tone, calling it “dismissive and disrespectful” of others’ opinions.

That group also urged more conversation about the role of senior fellows on campus. “The title confers some degree of CMU’s reputation on the recipient,” members wrote. “When a highly visible figure, such as Mr. Grenell, is to be hired in this role, there should be a more robust and open discussion across campus than took place in this case.” (Such a conversation should not include a “political or ideological litmus test,” they wrote.)

Outcry flared up again after the election, when Grenell posted false statements on Biden’s electoral victory in Nevada. Jahanian, the president, wrote in November that Grenell’s tweets “are an expression of personal opinion outside his work at CMU” and are protected by the First Amendment.

“Many in our community are concerned that the way in which Mr. Grenell is expressing himself is reflecting negatively on the university and its reputation,” Jahanian wrote. “However, I believe that the long-term reputational damage to CMU is potentially far greater if we are perceived as an institution of higher learning that is intolerant of other viewpoints.”

On Wednesday Jahanian wrote in a statement that he was “deeply troubled” by the “violent assault on our democracy” at the Capitol, “condemning the responsible parties for their actions.” He did not respond to a reporter’s question on Monday about whether his calculation on the long-term reputational damage of Grenell’s hire had changed.