The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency, can proceed with a subpoena demanding that the University of Pennsylvania provide information about Jewish employees as part of a probe of alleged Jew-hatred, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
The commission is investigating allegations that the private Ivy League school failed to address antisemitism against Jewish employees adequately. It asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in November to enforce a subpoena requiring the university to identify potential victims and witnesses of alleged instances of antisemitic actions against Jewish staff.
The university stated in a January filing that it is “extraordinary and unconstitutional” for the federal agency to demand that the university provide “personal home addresses, phone numbers and emails” of its Jewish employees and their affiliations with Jewish entities and involvement in the Jewish community.
The Philadelphia school also said that the demand was unnecessary, since it offered to inform employees that the federal agency was trying to hear their experiences with Jew-hatred.
Gerald Pappert ruled that the federal agency can obtain information related to its investigation and that Jewish employees in Jewish-related organizations and in Jewish studies programs “are reasonably likely to have information relevant to whether Penn subjected Jewish employees to religious discrimination.”
The university has offered “little in response” and has not provided a way to show that the subpoena is imposing an “undue burden,” the judge ruled. “Permitting Penn to shield the names of employees, who reported harassment, would give it a ‘potent weapon’ to interfere with the EEOC’s investigation.”
He also criticized the Ivy, and other groups that intervened in the case, for elevating “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.’”
“Such allegations are unfortunate and inappropriate,” Pappert wrote. “They also obfuscate the court’s limited role and the discrete legal issues before it.”
“The EEOC no longer seeks any employee’s specific affiliation with a particular Jewish-related organization on campus,” he wrote.
A spokesman for the federal commission declined to comment. A Penn spokesman told JNS that the Ivy knows the commission has an “important role” to probe discrimination, but the school has “an obligation to protect the rights of our employees.”
“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 spokesman told JNS. “The university does not maintain employee lists by religion. We intend to appeal.”
