Sharon Strauss – Quaker Courage

Penn seeks to protect privacy of Jewish faculty and staff

Quaker Courage applauds Penn’s efforts to protect the privacy of Jewish faculty, staff, and students. Penn is fighting a subpoena demanding names, addresses, and other sensitive information about Jewish faculty, staff, and student workers on campus.

We encourage you to join our Penn Pens letter writing campaign and thank Penn President Jameson and Board Chair Raghavendran. You can also sign a petition that started on campus. Read on for details about the issue and the petition.

According to a November 18, 2025 complaint that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed in Federal Court against Penn, the school is not fully complying with a subpoena.

In the filing, the EEOC states that they opened an investigation December 8, 2023, alleging that Penn was “subjecting Jewish faculty (including tenured, non-tenured, and adjunct professors), staff, and other employees (including, but not limited to, students employed by the university) to an unlawful hostile work environment based on national origin, religion, and/or race.” As part of their investigation, the EEOC subpoenaed Penn to “produce information relevant to the EEOC’s investigation of potential unlawful employment practices.”

Four days after the EEOC filing, on November 21, the New York Times reported that “Hundreds of students and faculty and staff members at the University of Pennsylvania signed a petition this week in support of their university’s refusal to turn over to the Trump administration names, phone numbers and physical addresses for some Jewish employees.” According to the article, Amanda Shanor, Associate Professor at Wharton, was one of those coordinating the petition.

On January 13, 2026, the ACLU of PA filed a motion to intervene in EEOC v. UPenn, on behalf of 5 Penn orgs: American Academy of Jewish Research, Jewish Law Students Association of Penn law school, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Penn’s chapter of AAUP, and the Penn Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty.

Penn responded to the complaint with a January 20, 2026 filing. Penn affirmed that they complied with most of the subpoena. However, to protect the privacy of Jewish faculty, staff, and students, they were not including sensitive information with names, addresses, and other identifying information that the EEOC requested. In the filing, Penn wrote:

The issue presented in the EEOC’s application is narrow but exceptionally consequential. Penn has cooperated for more than two years with the EEOC’s investigation, producing nearly 900 pages of materials. The sole dispute is over the EEOC’s extraordinary and unconstitutional demand that Penn assemble and produce lists of employees that reveal their Jewish faith or ancestry, associations with Jewish organizations, affiliation with Jewish studies, participation in programming for the Jewish community and/or de-anonymized responses to surveys on antisemitism, alongside their personal home addresses, phone numbers, and emails. The EEOC 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 government’s demand implicates Penn’s substantial interest in protecting its employees’ privacy, safety, and First Amendment rights.

One January 21, 2025, one day after Penn’s court filing, over 150 Penn Jewish faculty filed a brief in support of the University’s response to the lawsuit.

The litigation is ongoing. The EEOC was not impressed by the privacy issues Penn raised, nor the support Penn has received from so many different sources. On January 27, 2025 the EEOC responded with a new court filing. Their filing states that,”Rather than comply with EEOC’s requests aimed at identifying possible victims of and witnesses to a hostile work environment based on religion, national origin, and race, Respondent has instead chosen to undertake an intensive and relentless public relations campaign against the EEOC.”

Summary of Quaker Courage First Meeting

Sunday, January 18, Quaker Courage had its first meeting. Nine alums attended representing classes from 1967 to 1985. Participants Zoomed in from Santa Barbara to Kansas City to Boston to Philadelphia. Some have been active with the Penn alumni community; others have not. All were motivated by concern about Penn’s ability to live up to its values under pressure from our current government.

Background

Quaker Courage (QC) is pretty new. We started the meeting with the history of the group—why it started, and what QC has done so far. We have a website, QuakerCourage.org, and an active letter writing campaign.

Concerns/goals brainstormed by participants:

Penn making changes to policies, academic curricula, or other practices *because* Trump & Co. demand it.
Limiting rights of students under the guise of fairness (anti-DEI, trans, scholarships for minorities; so-call antisemitism efforts that are not that; limiting free speech of students, faculty or staff.)
Would like to know what alumni understand as the purpose of the university, how that purpose is realized in their life experience; how they see the university aligned with that.
How to support UP when under pressure from the Trump administration; gather info on what other universities/alums are doing and consider replicating/adapting; organize letter-writing to Congress? to Shapiro?
Concern about the governments’ interference with admissions, hiring and firing of professors, defunding programs it doesn’t agree with as well as research, especially medical research at which Penn has been at the forefront. Democracy depends on universities and the press, and the curtailing of either is dangerous.
Harness alums to take action; how to create a dialogue with top univ administrators about their positions on topics; set top 3-4 priority topics for on campus positions on antisemitism, foreign students, academic freedom; role of protests and equal representation of viewpoints.

Quaker Courage Vision:

Help Penn live up to its own vision and values. As they state on their website they are for “excellence, freedom of inquiry and expression, and respect. Penn’s culture is inspired by its founder, Benjamin Franklin—open-minded and curious, inventive and practical, exhibiting brilliance across fields, imperfect but self-improving, and relentlessly focused on enhancing social good.”

Actions we want to do now:

Add content to our blog, especially around issues we are watching.
Find information about other Penn groups and build connections.
Get in contact with other college courage groups and link their websites on our quakercourage.org blog
Come up with good motto and tagline
- Since the meeting, updated blog tagline to “Leges sine moribus vanae – Laws without morals are useless”
Write our own letters to university leadership.
Expand outreach efforts to grow our membership

Homework before next meeting (Feb. 15, 4pm)

Read Penn’s statement on their values and words that guide them
Join our letter writing campaign. Paper letters encouraged! If willing, share these for QC website by emailing them to info@quakercourage.org, but first delete anything that you do not want posted on the web.
Email info@quakercourage.org a paragraph about your concerns and what issues you are watching at Penn and universities/colleges elsewhere.

Quaker Courage launches

Quaker courage started as a germ of an idea between a few Penn alumni, after they attended the One Million Rising (nokings.org/rise) training in July 2025. In that training, we learned how the many pillars of society—arts, education, business, media, law, etc.—can each play an important role in maintaining our democracy. We watched as pressure was increasingly put upon Penn, Harvard, Columbia and other universities to comply with rules and demands that are at odds with academic freedom, free speech, equal opportunities for all, and the rigorous research and inquiry which has long drawn faculty and students around the world to Penn and other U.S. universities.

We pondered this throughout the summer. In the meantime, we watched as Crimson Courage at Harvard and similar campaigns supported their own universities in addressing similar attacks.

During Penn’s Homecoming on November 7, we launched our first action—a letter writing campaign. Members of our group went to Homecoming and talked with alumni at the event. At that time we called ourselves MAIP (Maintain Academic Freedom at Penn). We shared a short handout with our goals, and the name and addresses of President J. Larry Jameson and the Chairman of the Board, Ramanan Raghavendran.

Our conversations were very positive. Everybody we spoke to shared our concerns and many said they too would write letters. The letter campaign is ongoing. We encourage you to write too!

Shortly after Homecoming, we renamed the group Quaker Courage, to align with courage groups at other universities and with the Indivisible Courage Campaign. In December 2025 we registered Quaker Courage with Indivisible and now participate in that network.

As Quaker Courage launches, we hope to meet, learn from, and collaborate with other Penn groups already supporting Penn in standing up to its values. If you are aligned with such a group, please reach out to us at info@quakercourage.org!