Jan. 14 (UPI) — The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, along with the Democracy Defenders Fund and Hangly Aronchick Segal Pudlin and Schiller, filed a motion to join EEOC v. The University of Pennsylvania on behalf of five UPenn organizations Wednesday.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is demanding UPenn turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community. It claims the demand is part of the administration’s goal of combating anti-semitism on campuses.
Some of UPenn’s faculty and staff have denounced the demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history,” said a press release put out by attorneys of the lawyers.
The lawsuit was filed against Penn in November because the university refused to fully comply.
On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.
“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff — a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the team argued.
The EEOC is holding steady on its demand.
“The EEOC remains steadfast in its commitment to combatting workplace anti-Semitism and seeks to identify employees who may have experienced anti-Semitic harassment. Unfortunately, the employer continues to refuse to identify members of its workforce who may have been subjected to this unlawful conduct,” the EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, said in a statement. “An employer’s obstruction of efforts to identify witnesses and victims undermines the EEOC’s ability to investigate harassment.”
Jewish faculty, Hillel and other Jewish campus organizations are alarmed at the request from the EEOC.
“We are entering territory that should shock every single one of us,” Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, said on a press call. “That kind of information — however purportedly benign the excuses given for it — can be put to the most dangerous misuse. This is an abuse of government power that drags us back to some of the darkest chapters in our history.”
UPenn has complied with other government orders for information about its anti-semitism efforts, but it refused to comply with this order.
A spokesperson from the University said in November that “violating their privacy and trust is antithetical to making sure UPenn’s Jewish community feels protected and safe.”
“Part of what sets off alarm bells for people like me is a history of people using Jewish lists against Jews,” said Steven Weitzman, professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at UPenn. “The Nazi campaign against Jews depended on institutions like universities handing over information about their Jewish members to the authorities.”
“To put things bluntly, I don’t want my employer handing over information about my religious identity without my consent, and I see it as a violation of the First Amendment for the government to be forcing the university to do so. The government cannot guarantee that the information it accumulates about Jews won’t fall into the wrong hands,” Weitzman said.
“As Jewish study scholars, we know well the dangers of collecting such information,” said Beth Wenger, who teaches Jewish history at Penn.
“It doesn’t matter what the stated intent is. 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,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “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.”
“Like all Americans, Jewish students, faculty and staff at the University of Pennsylvania have First Amendment rights to freely associate in celebration of their Jewishness and to practice their religion without any interference from the government. We believe that compelled disclosure of protected personal information will chill these sacred freedoms, both on Penn’s campus and in the larger Jewish community,” said Matthew A. Hamermesh, attorney at Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller.
