Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administrationās efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania ā including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses ā as government abuse with āominous historical overtonesā.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administrationās stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the governmentās demand as āa visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ālists of Jewsā conjures a terrifying historyā, according to a press release put out by the groupsā lawyers.
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āThese requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff ā a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,ā the groups argued.
Why would they even have a record of this to begin with? Iāve never put my religion on a college or job application, and Iām not sure Iāve ever seen any applicable ethnicity question more than āwhiteā or ānot hispanicā otherwise. I suppose club and student group lists could theoretically expose some.