The Trump administration has abandoned its quest to force the University of Pennsylvania to turn over names of Jewish people on campus, according to a court filing on Thursday.
The retreat by the administration does not resolve the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s long-running inquiry into accusations of antisemitism at Penn. But the government’s decision to drop the subpoena appears to spell the end, at least in Penn’s case, of a politically volatile and legally fraught tactic.
The court filing did not explain the government’s decision.
For more than a year, the E.E.O.C. had been pressing Penn to surrender records about antisemitism complaints and a list of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.”
The government also demanded membership rosters of those groups, as well as a list of people who had worked in Penn’s Jewish Studies Program.
Penn responded to some of the government’s requests and balked at others, and the commission sued in November. The university and its allies warned that the government’s demands were unconstitutional and endangered people.
“The E.E.O.C. insists that Penn produce this information without the consent — and indeed, over the objections — of the employees impacted while entirely disregarding the frightening and well-documented history of governmental entities that undertook efforts to identify and assemble information regarding persons of Jewish ancestry,” the university said in a court filing in January.
But the government insisted that it needed the information to investigate antisemitism on Penn’s campus and that the university’s response had been hyperbolic and extreme.
“We’re not looking for a list of Jews or registry of Jews or a catalog of Jews,” Debra Lawrence, a lawyer for the commission, told a judge during a hearing in March. “How about a spreadsheet that identifies the contact information for potential victims and witnesses? That’s all that we’re looking for here.”
The judge, Gerald J. Pappert of Federal District Court in Philadelphia, ruled that month that the university largely had to comply with the subpoena, though he stayed his decision so that Penn could appeal.
Judge Pappert’s decision suggested discomfort with how the commission had pursued its inquiry, particularly a demand for information tied to groups “related to the Jewish religion.”
“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,” wrote Judge Pappert, a Republican whom President Barack Obama named to the federal bench.
Nevertheless, Judge Pappert said, Penn’s constitutional claims were “easily dispensed with.” Penn swiftly vowed to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and Judge Pappert later put his ruling on hold, writing that the case raised “complex, novel and constitutional issues” and that premature release of the records could cause harm.
The post Trump Administration Drops Subpoena Demanding List of Jews From Penn appeared first on New York Times.
