Audio of a Carnegie Mellon University staff council meeting two days after the school hosted last year’s controversial Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit — attended by President Donald Trump — details CMU leadership’s thinking on student speech, the institution’s reputation and risks to academia under the current administration.
The hourlong audio, obtained by Public Source yesterday, captures CMU President Farnam Jahanian discussing the event that sparked protests and ongoing debate about free expression on campus. His commentary ran the gamut from critiquing the Trump administration to defending his decision to paint over a “No rapists on campus” message before Trump’s arrival.
“You see how toxic this administration is. I mean, you should have no hesitation [about] how toxic this administration can be — how revengeful it can be,” Jahanian said to staff members.
A CMU spokesperson said that the school “is aware of a recording taken during a conversation,” adding that parts that have appeared on social media were “heavily edited” to present “matters out of context, highlighting only soundbites from a much longer, nuanced conversation about an incident last summer involving just a few individuals.”
Public Source reviewed audio of the entire unedited hourlong meeting.
CMU added that meetings of staff council “are intended to provide an open forum for candid discussions among staff council representatives” and aren’t supposed to be recorded or transcribed.
Public Source reached out to 54 people listed as members of staff council at the time, none of whom agreed to speak on record, but two of whom shared recollections of comments made in the meeting.
News of Trump’s presence prompted backlash from some students, including a contingent who painted the message on a concrete wall known as “The Fence.” The campus tradition spanning a century designates it for all kinds of messaging (including protest), with rules governing when and how it can be painted.
Jahanian told the council his July 2025 decision to whitewash the message was made to protect the school’s reputation and international students, not for financial or political reasons.
He said some people “may wonder that I painted The Fence because, ‘Oh, we just don’t want to piss off Trump.’” But, for “anyone who says that, I just want to remind you … we are a named plaintiff in two lawsuits against the administration. Many of our peer institutions did not join it.”
Still, the federal administration was a factor in campus actions, according to Jahanian. “It was not an easy decision, partially because it’s Trump. If it was anybody else, the kind of emotions that are evoked would not be evoked,” Jahanian said.
“It’s a visceral reaction to the divisions that we have in this country and how Trump publicly has been behaving.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly wrote to Public Source in a statement that Jahanian’s language is “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade” and that “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public — which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration has threatened to restrict federal research funding, changed the visa process for international students and investigated CMU for engaging in “race-exclusionary practices.”
Jahanian told staff council that “things aren’t going to get easier” for the university moving forward, and late in the meeting listed federal actions as high among threats to the school’s financial health.
“The truth is that the country has been on this divisive journey for a while and things are just going to get harder for us, and we have to recognize it,” he said.
He went on to say that the challenges call for new rules around how an important piece of student expression operates on CMU’s campus.
The Fence, a wooden barrier that’s often painted with messages referring to world events, has been described by the university as a “self-regulating, student-governed space for open expression” that has existed for over a century.
Last year, though, marked the beginning of tension between students and university administrators over the content written on The Fence. At the meeting, Jahanian referenced five incidents of inflammatory messages on the barrier that took place before the summit.
One of those was the sentence, “Down with Nazism, Zionism, Hindutva!” to which Jahanian said to staff members, “I’m not going to take any position on Zionism or Hinduism. I will take a position on Nazism — there should be no ambiguity.”
“You put that up with no attribution … it’s no longer free speech, it’s graffiti,” he continued.
A staff member at the meeting claimed that The Fence is one of the few places left for free expression on campus after the creation of an expressive activity policy. The policy requires registration for events expecting 50-plus participants, and was enacted following a wave of pro-Palestinian protests at universities in 2024.
Jahanian told the staff member that “suggesting that’s the only place of free expression is actually inaccurate” and disputed that The Fence is a place of free expression at all.
“It’s not a place that you can go and have a civil discourse. In fact, you can’t write obscenity on it,” Jahanian said.
Jahanian said he spoke with the students who wrote the “No rapists on campus” message on The Fence, which led to it being closed for painting for the first time in its existence. He said they agreed that The Fence guidelines should be reviewed.
He described the students as “three white kids from privileged families,” who “don’t know shit” and “did not think about the implication of [writing] that for people whose livelihood depends on being employed at Carnegie Mellon.” Nor did they consider that international students “would be terrified” of attending a university with that message on The Fence, because their visas could be impacted.
Following pushback at some of his comments about students, Jahanian apologized to staff “if I came across as disrespectful of them.”
The Fence reopened for painting in the week following the summit, but not before a group of students built a second one protesting the first’s closure. Jahanian tasked a committee to create recommendations for how The Fence should function in the future, which was released last month.
Some of the group’s recommendations were that CMU administration only paint over The Fence messages in rare, extreme cases tied to legal liability (not simply because content is uncomfortable), student government serve as the first responder for content disputes, and that messages be more clearly attributed to individual painters. Jahanian said a decision on whether to follow the recommendations would be made in the fall.
- Students paint words on the new fence outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Wagner Hall on July 21, in Squirrel Hill. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
- Student activists roll a fence across Forbes Avenue to be installed outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Wagner Hall in the early hours of July 21, in Squirrel Hill. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
- “Free speech is CMU history,” reads a design penned out by Aster Lufkin, a junior studying costume design, as he works with other student activists to plan a new fence outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Wagner Hall on July 21. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
- River Sepinuck, 20, communications chair of the CMU College Democrats, screws together a new fence outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Wagner Hall on July 21. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
- River Sepinuck, far left, 20, a junior studying robotics and mechanical engineering and communications chair of the CMU College Democrats, talks with Alexander Werth, center, 19, mechanical engineering and robotics student, as he paints a fence that student activists installed outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Warner Hall on July 21. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
Campus discussions and conflict over The Fence reignited last month. Phrases including “Free Palestine by any means necessary,” “Forcing ideological conformity (Zionism) on Jews is Antisemitic,” and a Yiddish translation of “Death to Zionism” were all written on the barrier throughout the month.
University police launched investigations into each instance, and Jahanian called the words “threatening” in a campuswide letter.
“No tradition exists apart from the community it serves,” he wrote. “Whatever decisions emerge from our review of the report’s recommendations, one principle is unchanged: Carnegie Mellon must remain a place where difficult ideas can be debated vigorously without sacrificing the safety, dignity and belonging of members of our community.”
The side of the Fence bearing the “Death to Zionism” sentence was swiftly painted over, and once again, led to campus cries of censorship.
Several messages protesting the painting have popped up over the last week: “Stop censoring anti-Zionist Jewish voices,” “Death to fascism, apartheid, Zionism, colonialism, racism,” and “21,000 children murdered due to Zionism. Who are the ones inciting violence here?”
None of the new messages were painted over. Jahanian did not reference any protest messages in his last campuswide letter on June 30.