Federal Judge Orders Penn to Release Data on Jewish Employees Amid Discrimination Investigation

A federal judge has mandated that the University of Pennsylvania provide records concerning Jewish employees to a federal body investigating allegations of antisemitic discrimination. However, the judge specified that the university isn’t required to disclose any individual’s association with particular groups.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Pappert emphasized that while employees have the option to decline participation in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation, the agency should be allowed to communicate with them directly to ascertain any evidence of discrimination.

The judge largely supported an administrative subpoena but ruled that the university is not obligated to reveal any worker’s ties to Jewish-related organizations or furnish details about three particular Jewish-affiliated groups. The university must comply with these orders by May 1.

In a response via email, a spokesperson for the university stated their commitment to tackling antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, noting several initiatives undertaken to address and prevent such incidents. The university intends to appeal the decision.

The university’s statement articulated, “While we recognize the EEOC’s crucial role in examining discrimination, we must also safeguard our employees’ rights. We maintain that obligating Penn to compile lists of Jewish faculty and staff, along with providing personal contact details, presents significant privacy and First Amendment issues. The University does not catalog employees by religion.”

A former federal official, speaking anonymously due to a lack of authorization to discuss the case, noted that it is not uncommon for federal inquiries into workplace discrimination to seek the identities of employees belonging to a specific religion. This is typically done to reach out to individuals who might have experienced discrimination.

Pappert wrote that the university and others who joined the litigation “significantly raised the dispute’s temperature by impliedly and even expressly comparing the EEOC’s efforts to protect Jewish employees from antisemitism to the Holocaust and the Nazis’ compilation of ‘lists of Jews.’” The judge called that “unfortunate and inappropriate.”

Pappert wrote that Penn and the others who opposed the subpoena were primarily concerned about linking employees to Jewish groups, saying “the EEOC no longer seeks any employee’s specific affiliation with a particular Jewish-related organization on campus.”

The judge exempted information about three Jewish organizations from the subpoena — MEOR, Penn Hillel and Chabad Lubavitch House. Executive directors with all three groups had declared in court filings they were legally and financially separate from the university.

“The privacy of persons making use of Chabad at Penn’s services and facilities is vital to Chabad at Penn’s operations,” Rabbi Menachem Schmidt said in a January declaration. “Chabad at Penn is accordingly concerned about the impact that non-consensual disclosure of personal information could have on its mission and activities.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation was prompted in part by a series of incidents, including that someone had shouted antisemitic obscenities and destroyed property at a Jewish student life center, a Nazi swastika was painted on an academic building and “hateful graffiti” was left outside a fraternity.

The investigation has also focused on actions related to protests over the war in Gaza, and Penn’s response to that and other incidents.

The EEOC claimed in a November filing that Penn’s “workplace is replete with antisemitism,” and it told the judge that investigators think “identification of those who have witnessed and/or been subjected to the environment is essential for determining whether the work environment was both objectively and subjectively hostile.”