Trump Administration Seems Likely to Win Lawsuit Against University of Pennsylvania

The Trump administration has been involved in a months long fight with the University of Pennsylvania. It began when the Trump EEOC asked the university for a list of employees who had experienced anti-Semitism on campus. The school refused and the Trump administration sued to get the information last November.

The administration sued the university on Tuesday, arguing that the Ivy League institution has “refused to comply” with a subpoena from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is investigating antisemitism on the Philadelphia campus.

The subpoena seeks contact information for employees who have filed complaints about discrimination based on Jewish faith, those who belong to Jewish clubs or groups on campus, and anyone who works in the university’s Jewish studies program, according to the lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The information is “relevant to the EEOC’s investigation of potential unlawful employment practices, namely religious, national origin, and race-based harassment,” the E.E.O.C. says in a court filing.

The fact that this investigation was aimed at uncovering claims of anti-Semitism on campus didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was that the government wanted a list of Jewish names. Suddenly professors saw themselves as fighting the Nazis.

Amanda Shanor, an associate professor at Wharton, the university’s business school, who helped organize the petition, said the administration’s request was “terrifying.”

“The history of creating lists of Jewish people for the government is one of the most frightening in world history,” Ms. Shanor said in an interview on Friday. “And the idea that this is being done in the interest of the Jewish community is particularly frightening.”

That conflict spawned a petition and various demands from unions that the school refuse to comply with the government’s subpoena. This week the case finally went before a judge and, not surprisingly, he found the government’s case mostly compelling.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Philadelphia, Gerald J. Pappert, considered whether the government’s tactics went too far. Although the judge did not immediately rule, he appeared receptive to the Trump administration’s argument that it should be able to subpoena such information as it investigates potential episodes of antisemitism on campus, including some related to protests over the war in Gaza…

Judge Pappert warned that his role in the case was a narrow one: to decide whether the government’s claim of potential workplace discrimination was valid under federal law, and if information sought by the E.E.O.C.’s subpoena was relevant to its investigation.

“It seems to clear the low bar,” he said about 45 minutes into the three-and-a-half-hour hearing.

Judge Pappert, a former Republican attorney general in Pennsylvania who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, bristled over arguments that the government’s demand threatened Jewish employees. He said objections from university leaders and faculty — two groups not typically aligned inside a courtroom — would complicate the E.E.O.C.’s attempt to investigate antisemitism.

The best argument raised by the university was that it didn’t have the information the government was seeking. It probably doesn’t have anything like a complete list of students by religion. On the other hand, the government has never been asking for such a list.

“We’re not looking for a list of Jews or registry of Jews or a catalog of Jews,” Ms. Lawrence told the judge. “How about a spreadsheet that identifies the contact information for potential victims and witnesses? That’s all that we’re looking for here.”

So that’s where this stands at the moment. It seems likely the judge is going to rule in the Trump EEOC’s favor and the school will be forced to turn over something. This will not lead to any anti-Semitism from the government as some seem eager to predict. And of course the NY Times seems happy to go along with this nonsense. Here’s how they opened the story about the judge’s reaction to the evidence:

Jacob Naimark, a law student at the University of Pennsylvania, has worried ever since he learned that Trump administration investigators had demanded that his school turn over the names of many Jewish people on campus.

“It was disturbing,” said Mr. Naimark, a co-president of the school’s Jewish Law Students Association, adding, “We know very well the history of governments assembling lists of Jews does not end well.”

This is not 1938 and the US government is not the Third Reich. On the contrary, the people who set up anti-Israel tent camps on campuses nationwide were mostly students, sometimes aided by faculty members. And it was university presidents who struggled to do anything about the sometimes blatant anti-Semitism being spewed on those campuses.

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