Category: Courage Watch

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.”

Penn and the other Ivy League institutions made a huge mistake in February 2025. Apparently, our leaders had not read Timothy Snyder’s essential book “On Tyranny.”  Snyder’s first two lesson are “Do not obey in advance” and “Defend institutions.” When threatened with loss of Federal funds, Penn immediately went beyond what was requested to meet Trump’s demands. It scrubbed all references to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion from web sites, department, staff titles, program description and outreach initiatives. Overnight the DEI office became the “Office of Academic Excellence and Engagement.” Penn officials apparently were intimidated by the unwarranted forced resignation of Pres. Liz McGill the previous year instigated by Penn Trustee Marc Rowan, a designer of Trump’s “Project 2025” plan to attack the nation’s elite institutions.

A group of alumni with experience in resisting the University in their student years immediately responded by buying a half page ad in the Daily Pennsylvanian that places a Spine on a flag and asks “What’s wrong with Diversity…Equity… Inclusion?

During Homecoming in November 2025, one of our Quaker Courage  members asked the same question of the Chair of the Trustees, Ramanan Raghavendran.  He responded that the university “certainly does not embrace the opposite of those principles – monolithic, inequitable and exclusionary.” That was a decent answer though lacking in specifics. We also learned the next day that Rowan is leaving the Trustee board.