This Professor Made Up a Job Offer From Another University. Now He Faces a Criminal Charge.

In January 2015, Brian R. McNaughton, an associate professor at Colorado State University, sent his administration an offer letter he’d received from another university.

To entice McNaughton to stay, Colorado State raised his base pay by $5,000, a university spokeswoman said. Using offer letters from other institutions as leverage in salary negotiations is common practice at colleges and universities.

There was just one problem with McNaughton’s case: The offer letter was fake.

McNaughton now faces a criminal charge of attempting to influence a public official for allegedly falsifying an offer letter from the University of Minnesota. He has since resigned from his position at Colorado State.

The Chronicle obtained a letter McNaughton sent to Janice Nerger, dean of Colorado State’s College of Natural Sciences, in July 2017 in which he apologized for making “a very bad decision.” He cited marital and financial stress as factors in his actions, adding that he had seen colleagues falsify outside offers.

“It was openly stated that multiple former CSU faculty (now either dead or no longer affiliated with CSU) lied about an outside offer as a mechanism to improve their salary,” McNaughton wrote to Nerger. “I’m not excusing it, and I’m not excusing my own actions, but these factors are real.”

Dell Rae Ciaravola, a Colorado State spokeswoman, told The Chronicle in an email that the university “has no evidence of any other falsified offer letters.”

McNaughton referred a request for comment to his lawyer, who did not immediately respond.