October 08, 2026
Thom Carroll/for PhillyVoice
A federal appeals court vacated a March order for the University of Pennsylvania to turn over the names and contact information of Jewish studies faculty and students affiliated with Jewish campus groups to the EEOC.
An appeals court has vacated an order for the University of Pennsylvania to provide a list of Jewish faculty and students to the federal government, capping off a battle between the college and the Trump administration that's dominated much of the year.
The latest legal action reverses a lower court ruling handed down in March that compelled Penn to provide the names and contact information of Jewish studies professors and people connected to Jewish organizations on campus to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC had been seeking this information since July 2025 and sued the college that fall when it did not comply. While the stated purpose of the subpoena was to aid a probe into antisemitism on Penn's campus, critics of the government's lawsuit said creating a "registry" of Jewish people "conjures a terrifying history" of Nazi persecution.
Five Penn organizations, with the help of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, filed a motion to block the subpoena in January. A federal judge sided with the EEOC two months later, prompting an appeal. While that appeal made its way through the courts, however, the Trump administration agreed to drop the lawsuit, effectively settling with the university.
The appeals court's decision, issued Tuesday, thus had little effect on Penn. But ACLU lawyers and others who worked on the case argue it protects all American colleges from future federal overreach.
"The subpoena deeply scared many here," said Amanda Shanor, a constitutional law scholar at Penn and co-counsel on the appeal. "And even after the university and the EEOC settled (pausing enforcement of the subpoena), intervening faculty, staff, and students were steadfast in their desire to make sure that the district court’s opinion could not be later weaponized against them or used to authorize a demand for Jews or any other group at other universities."
"This victory is exactly what we were fighting for when we decided to continue our appeal," Lorena Grundy, vice president of the American Association of University Professors, added. "We wanted to make sure that the district court ruling in favor of the EEOC was vacated, so that the EEOC couldn’t try to use it to persuade other universities to give up the kind of information it sought from Penn."
In her ruling, Judge Cindy K. Chung remanded the the case to the district court with instruction to dismiss it.
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