A Princeton University student who argued that his conservative views were not accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views, authorities said Monday.

Francisco Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, Princeton Township police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work, too, said Detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi.

A spokeswoman for the Ivy League university said Monday that punishment, which could range from a warning to expulsion, was pending.

Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the student newspaper criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he said encouraged a dangerous “hook-up culture.”

A short time later, Nava made his first report to the university public safety office that he was receiving threatening messages in his campus mailbox. A friend says Nava told him one message read, in capital letters: “ONE MORE ARTICLE AND YOU WON’T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.”