Officials with the Trump administration have officially dropped their request for the University of Pennsylvania to hand over a list of names of Jewish people on campus, according to new court documents.
This comes months after a federal judge ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.
But, on July 23, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission submitted a request for dismissal of that subpoena.
It is not unusual for federal investigators looking into employment discrimination to request identities of employees of a particular religion, to facilitate outreach to people who may have been victims, according to a former federal official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation was prompted in part by a series of incidents, including that someone had shouted antisemitic obscenities and destroyed property at a Jewish student life center, a Nazi swastika was painted on an academic building and “hateful graffiti” was left outside a fraternity.
The investigation has also focused on actions related to protests over the war in Gaza, and Penn’s response to that and other incidents.
The EEOC claimed in a November filing that Penn’s “workplace is replete with antisemitism,” and it told the judge that investigators think “identification of those who have witnessed and/or been subjected to the environment is essential for determining whether the work environment was both objectively and subjectively hostile.”