In July, Penn resolved its dispute with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission without turning over personal information about its Jewish employees. Months later, questions about the investigation and its implications for the University remain.
On Sept. 22, community members gathered on campus to discuss how the events surrounding the lawsuit could affect the University moving forward. Approximately 60 individuals attended in person and nearly 200 joined by Zoom.
The conversation — hosted by Penn’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy — featured four panelists: Wharton School and Penn Carey Law School professor Amanda Shanor, Syracuse University professor Britt Tevis, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and 2024 College graduate and first-year sociology Ph.D. candidate Olivia Haynie.
Religious studies professor and Katz Center Director Steven Weitzman moderated the event.
In his introduction, Weitzman explained that the event’s purpose was to examine “constitutional, legal, and ethical questions, along with questions about the future of higher education and the struggle against antisemitism.”
In July 2025, the EEOC issued a subpoena seeking personal information about Jewish employees at Penn. The agency’s November 2025 lawsuit — which alleged that the University failed to provide requested documents — was dropped in July 2026.
In a statement, Weitzman wrote that the organizers’ main goal was to “educate” community members “about what is at stake in this case and why it has implications for everyone in higher education.”
“I am using the present tense to describe the case because there is nothing in Penn’s settlement that stops the government from demanding such a list from other schools,” Weitzman wrote. “Moreover, a ruling from the district judge in our case, though not precedent-setting, means that the EEOC’s demand is currently recognized as legal and constitutional.”
Shanor, who represented the five campus groups that intervened as defendants in the suit, described the federal agency’s action as “unconstitutional 87 ways to Sunday.” At the event, she said that it “could set a precedent that would allow the government to collect and disclose lists of all kinds of people based on their religious affiliation, group association, speech, or academic work.”
“This is also part of a larger project of the administration to really bring universities to ideological heel,” Shanor added.
Haynie said that Penn had “already communicated the way that students could contact the federal government and contact the EEOC if they needed to.”
“As a returning Jewish student and a student whose information would be on this list, I think what I was really struck by is the purported reason that the EEOC wanted this list — that they said they wanted to give students the chance to speak up for themselves,” Haynie added.
Haynie, who was a senior during the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and subsequent campus protests, said that the University’s Jewish community “can handle itself and have no trouble speaking up for itself.”
Randi Weingarten, who attended via Zoom, said that her aim was to “make clear that the democracy project is going to protect people more than any kind of authoritarian project.”
Syracuse University Jewish Studies professor Britt Tevis said that she did not know of any precedent related to this case.
In an interview after the event, Tevis said she hoped audience members would understand “the ways in which the government can be instrumentalized for good,” along with how certain powers can be used “for purposes other than what laws originally intended.”
Vice President of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors Lorena Grundy said she was “really impressed” by the degree of engagement at the event.
“This is clearly, as we've known from the beginning, an issue that a lot of people care deeply about,” Grundy — a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor — said in an interview. “I thought that the speakers did an amazing job sharing the context and really setting up why this was such an important issue.”
Senior reporter Lavanya Mani covers legal affairs and can be reached at mani@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies comparative literature. Follow her on X @LavanyaMani_.
