Federal investigators have begun interviewing UC Berkeley faculty as part of an antisemitism probe instigated by the Trump administration.
This week, two professors spoke to J. on the condition of anonymity to share details about the questions they were asked during lengthy video calls.
According to the professors, the interviews were conducted by investigators with both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency responsible for enforcing laws that prohibit harassment and discrimination by employers.
So far, the interviews have been conducted through remote video calls that have lasted from about one to two hours, according to the faculty members.
“Their mandate is to find out about Jewish and Israeli faculty who were discriminated against due to religion, identity or nationality,” one professor said, adding that extra attention was paid to the institutional response to any discrimination complaints rather than the acts themselves.
“They are less focused on the discrimination committed by faculty and staff, and more focused on the failure of OPHD (the office responsible for investigating discrimination) to take antisemitism seriously,” the professor said in an email to J. OPHD is short for the Office for the Prevention of Harassment & Discrimination.
The DOJ’s taskforce to combat antisemitism announced in February that it would visit 10 campuses, including UC Berkeley, to interrogate whether the campuses “failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination.” On March 5, the task force announced an employment discrimination investigation into the University of California system.
The taskforce formed days after Trump signed a Jan. 29 executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
Earlier this month, to assist investigators, Cal administrators were ordered by federal subpoena to turn over contact information for hundreds of faculty members who signed open letters about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between Oct. 7, 2023, and May 2024.Some faculty members spoke out against the demand. The Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an agency working on behalf of university faculty, described the subpoena as an attempt to “pit faculty members against one another,” the Daily Californian reported. The university complied with the subpoena, according to the Daily Cal, despite the council’s demand that the university refuse to do so.