This story is developing and will continue to be updated.
A judge has ordered Penn to comply with a federal subpoena seeking information about Jewish students, faculty, and campus groups.
The Tuesday order is the culmination of a months-long legal battle between Penn and the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over the agency’s authority to enforce a subpoena first issued in July 2025. A University spokesperson told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Penn intends to appeal the ruling.
Penn has until May 1 to respond to the subpoena's requests, but will not be required to “reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific Jewish-related organization.”
An EEOC spokesperson wrote that “the agency has no comment at this time,” and referred The Daily Pennsylvanian to Pappert’s opinion.
“For their legal arguments, respondents contend the charge of discrimination is invalid and the subpoena violates the United States Constitution in various ways,” U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Pappert wrote in a March 31 memorandum filed alongside the order. “But the charge is valid and the constitutional claims are easily dispensed with.”
He added that Penn — along with other campus groups involved in 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.'”
“Such allegations are unfortunate and inappropriate,” Pappert wrote.
“While we acknowledge the important role of the EEOC to investigate discrimination, we also have an obligation to protect the rights of our employees,” a University spokesperson wrote in a statement to the DP. “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.”
They added that Penn contains no such list, and remains “committed to confronting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and have taken multiple steps to prevent and address these despicable events.”
The memo argued that the EEOC has a “broad right of access” to information that might establish “reasonable cause” regarding workplace discrimination. Pappert added that the EEOC often files charges “based on publicly available information” to avoid forcing employees to come forward individually, and that the EEOC’s charge against Penn fit that description.
“These factual references—all of which Penn acknowledges—bolster Commissioner Lucas’s charge that Penn failed to provide Jewish faculty, staff and other employees a work environment free from harassment in the form of hateful and vile antisemitic slurs, messages and threats of violence,” the document read.
Earlier this month, Pappert heard oral arguments as part of the case. At the beginning of the trial, he emphasized that his role was solely to determine whether the EEOC had a valid charge, not to debate the merits of the agency’s charges. He repeated the point several times during the three-hour-long proceedings.
In the March 31 memo, Pappert wrote that the Court’s duty is to specifically “determine if the charge of discrimination is valid, whether the subpoena seeks information relevant to the charge and whether the subpoena unduly burdens Penn.”
According to Pappert, the information requested by the EEOC “easily clears” the “low bar” of relevancy. He added that the employees whose contact information Penn would be required to provide under the subpoena request “are reasonably likely to have information relevant to whether Penn subjected employees to religious discrimination.”
In November 2025, the EEOC filed a lawsuit alleging that Penn failed to comply with the agency’s requirements. At the time, a University spokesperson told the DP that Penn “cooperated extensively” with the EEOC but would not provide “personal and confidential” information of students and employees without their consent.
That month, hundreds of members of the Penn community signed a petition criticizing the actions taken by the EEOC. Faculty and student groups highlighted concerns about the historical connotations of collecting personal information on Jewish individuals.
Other campus stakeholders have characterized the EEOC’s investigation — which included obtaining the personal phone numbers of Penn community members — as “odd” and “amateurish.”
In January, Penn submitted a brief in response to the agency’s claims of noncompliance, stating that the University has agreed to the agency’s demands, but remains unwilling to submit personal information without the consent of the affected parties.
The brief described the subpoena as “disconcerting but also entirely unnecessary,” arguing that disclosing private details would “erode trust between Penn and its employees and the broader Jewish community at Penn.”
In a filing later that month, the EEOC claimed Penn “impeded” the agency’s investigation into allegations of campus antisemitism and that its subpoena was “no different” from other requests for information in previous investigations.
The Penn-affiliated groups motioned to intervene as defendants in the lawsuit in January and were approved on Feb. 3.
Staff reporter Lavanya Mani covers legal affairs and can be reached at mani@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies English. Follow her on X @lavanyamani_.
