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A federal judge in Pennsylvania will decide whether the University of Pennsylvania must comply with a subpoena sought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its investigation into whether antisemitism created a hostile work environment for Jewish faculty and employees. The issue came before U.S. District Judge Gerald Pappert at a Tuesday hearing, where the EEOC asked him to enforce an administrative subpoena it issued as part of the probe.
The EEOC’s demand seeks records involving the membership of Jewish groups at Penn, according to the description of the dispute presented in court. The agency’s request, filed in November against Penn’s Board of Trustees, is tied to claims that the university subjected Jewish faculty and employees to an illegal hostile work environment based on national origin, religion or race.
At the Tuesday hearing, the EEOC cited specific incidents it said supported its inquiry, including an episode in which someone shouted antisemitic obscenities and destroyed property at a Jewish student life center. The agency also pointed to what it said were acts involving a Nazi swastika painted on an academic building and “hateful graffiti” left outside a fraternity, and it also said the investigation has focused on actions related to protests over the war in Gaza and Penn’s responses.
The legal battle began in December 2023, when the EEOC accused Penn of what it described as a pattern of antisemitic behavior. In a court document described at Tuesday’s hearing, the EEOC said it acted “in light of the probable reluctance of Jewish faculty and staff to complain of a harassing environment due to fear of hostility and potential violence directed against them.”
The EEOC’s filing in November argued that Penn’s workplace is “replete with antisemitism” and asked the judge to enforce the subpoena in part because investigators said identifying people who witnessed or experienced the environment was “essential for determining whether the work environment was both objectively and subjectively hostile.” The case centered on whether Penn must take the additional step the EEOC demanded: assembling lists that could reveal employees’ Jewish faith or ancestry and other affiliations.
Penn’s lawyers told Pappert that the school has already cooperated for more than two years, turning over about 900 pages of material. They argued that the remaining dispute is not about cooperation, but about what Penn characterized as the EEOC’s “extraordinary and unconstitutional demand” that would require the university to compile lists of employees that reveal Jewish religious or ancestral information, associations with Jewish organizations and ties to Penn’s Jewish studies programs, along with other details including home addresses and contact information.
Pappert did not say after the roughly four-hour hearing when he might rule. A Penn spokesperson, in an email, said the school would wait for Pappert’s decision. Messages seeking comment were also left Tuesday for the EEOC’s regional attorney, Debra Lawrence, and at the agency’s Philadelphia office.
Vic Walczak, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who said he represents five groups in the case, told the judge that the organizations are concerned about the collection and potential use of the information the government demanded. Walczak said the groups support investigating antisemitism but oppose what he described as requiring Penn to create lists of participants in Jewish organizations and to turn over confidential information, including home addresses, describing it as “not the way to do it.”
Penn said it had offered a different approach, including notifying employees about the investigation and telling them how to contact the agency, but the school said the EEOC rejected that proposal. Penn argued that the offered approach would “not invade employees’ privacy, sense of safety, and constitutional rights” and that the broader demand from the EEOC would echo “terrifying periods of history” for Jewish communities.