A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the University of Pennsylvania must turn over the names of its Jewish employees and students by the end of May, but the school has said it will appeal the decision.
Since July, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been pressuring the school to release information on people who are affiliated with Jewish organizations. When the university failed to comply, the EEOC filed a lawsuit saying it must follow the its subpoena, which is part of a probe about antisemitism on campuses.
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Tuesday’s ruling in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania said Penn must share the information by May 1, though it does not need to share which organization people are connected with.
“While we acknowledge the important role of the EEOC to investigate discrimination, we also have an obligation to protect the rights of our employees,” a Penn spokesperson said in a statement. “We continue to believe that requiring Penn to create lists of Jewish faculty and staff, and to provide personal contact information, raises serious privacy and First Amendment concerns.”
The federal government has said that the information will help it find people who may have experienced antisemitism on campus. Penn first garnered federal scrutiny in 2023 when university President Liz Magill evaded questions about whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished during a congressional hearing on antisemitism. The response eventually led to her resignation.
U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, noted in his 32-page memorandum that the initial request called for providing information on school groups and organizations “related to the Jewish religion,” and contact information for Penn employees who associate with them.
“Though ineptly worded, the request had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way, as opposed to seeking information on all university employees, information on individuals in Penn’s Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace,” Pappert said.
However, critics of the lawsuit have said that it is dangerous to create a “registry” of certain groups on campus and likened it to some of the policies in Nazi Germany, a comparison which Pappert called “unfortunate and inappropriate.”
In January, the ACLU of Pennsylvania and other civil rights groups filed a motion to block the federal government’s lawsuit.
“It doesn’t matter what the stated intent is,” ACLU Legal Director Witold Walczak said in a statement in January. “The moment our government begins compiling lists of people based on their religion or ethnicity — especially when those groups have historically faced persecution and worse — we cross a dangerous line. These types of registries don’t remain benign; they create a user-friendly tool for discrimination, and history shows us that actors with malicious goals can easily weaponize them.”
Penn has said previously that it’s cooperated with the EEOC and provided more than 900 pages of information in 100 documents and only declined to share the personal information, the Inquirer reported.