Penn group sues to keep documents from Congress
PHILADELPHIA – Two University of Pennsylvania faculty members and the recently formed Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine are suing Penn in federal court to stop the transfer of documents about faculty and students to a congressional committee investigating complaints of antisemitism on the campus.
The lawsuit warns of a new “McCarthyism” taking hold, likening the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is investigating colleges’ handling of antisemitism complaints, to the House Un-American Activities Committee that investigated citizens for alleged communist ties in the 1950s.
“The House is, exactly as HUAC did in the 1950s, reaching out to chill, threaten, and punish Americans whose views it disapproves,” the lawsuit said.
“The committee has eagerly joined billionaire donors, pro-Israel groups, other litigants, and segments of the media in accusing Penn of being a pervasively antisemitic environment (which it is not).”
The university should not provide the documents, the lawsuit argued, asserting that this may put faculty and students, who are exercising their right to speak out in support of Palestinians and have already been doxed and threatened, at further risk.
The committee, it said, is seeking documents concerning student and faculty activities around “anti-Israel” protests on campus, including findings and results of any disciplinary processes for faculty and students and sources of funding and activities of student groups at Penn that have been critical of Israel and in support of Palestinians.
The faculty group bringing the action was formed earlier this year and is made up of faculty, staff, and graduate students. It held a “die-in” vigil on campus in January to recognize the lives lost in Gaza.
Shay Negron, the group’s lawyer, said the suit filed Monday seeks an injunction from the court to prevent Penn from providing the documents to the committee with information about the plaintiffs.
A Penn spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit and said the university had not yet been served.
The House Committee also declined to comment.
Penn began providing documents to the congressional committee in February. The university declined to comment on that process. The committee has already subpoenaed Harvard for documents it said the university has not provided.
The committee launched its investigation into Penn, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after holding a December hearing on colleges’ responses to antisemitism complaints on campuses. At the hearing, former Penn president Liz Magill testified during questioning that it was a “context-dependent decision” on whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated the university’s code of conduct.
A bipartisan backlash to Magill’s comments ensued and she resigned days later. Harvard’s former president Claudine Gay also resigned in January, facing similar criticism for her testimony as well as accusations of plagiarism.
Magill’s answer to the committee, the lawsuit said, “was a good faith and honorable answer under the First Amendment and Penn’s commitments regarding academic freedom.”
The information sought by the committee, the suit claimed, also includes “private FERPA-protected student files and documents” about the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which was held on campus in September. The festival, critics say, included speakers with a history of making antisemitic remarks, while supporters said it was a celebration of Palestinian art.
Penn was roiled in controversy over the festival, which only grew after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.
Bringing the lawsuit against Penn is Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature who co-organized the festival, and Eve M. Troutt Powell, a professor of history and Africana studies. Both are tenured professors “who have been threatened, accused, and doxed for the subject matter they teach and their First Amendment-protected criticism of Israel, and their advocacy for Palestinians and the people of Gaza,” the suit said.
Troutt Powell said in a press release: “As the monstrous onslaught of Israel’s instrumentalist attacks continues to kill thousands and thousands of Gazans, we have continued to confront not only our despair but also being demonized as antisemites while Palestinian lives are discounted as half as valuable as Israeli lives, and that is when they are counted at all.”
Troutt Powell has received hundreds of threatening and hateful emails, the suit said.
“Fakhreddine has been excluded from faculty meetings, her emails to the members of her department censored, and co-sponsorship of events canceled,” the suit said.
Fakhreddine, who is identified in the lawsuit as an Arab American, said in the press release that the reaction to the literature festival “caught Penn by surprise” and the university “failed to acknowledge how the onslaught of anti-intellectual anger endangered the festival organizers and its mission as a university.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)