https://medium.com/@hrnews1/uc-berkley-gives-up-student-and-staff-names-to-trump-in-unprecedented-mccarthyist-witch-hunt-ab964df256be One had rather hoped that American universities — those self-proclaimed citadels of enlightenment and free inquiry — might have learned something from the sordid pageant of McCarthyism. Apparently not.

The University of California, Berkeley, an institution that once prided itself on being the very cradle of the Free Speech Movement, has now distinguished itself by compiling and surrendering a list of 160 names to the Trump administration’s Department of Education. The crime of these faculty members, students, and staff? They stand accused — though “accused” dignifies the process far beyond what it deserves — of “alleged antisemitic incidents.”

160 names. No notification. No due process. No defense.

Let us pause to admire the exquisite cowardice of that bureaucratic formulation: “alleged antisemitic incidents.” Not proven. Not substantiated. Not even clearly defined. Merely alleged — a word that in the hands of the vindictive and the opportunistic becomes a license for unlimited persecution.

What makes this episode particularly nauseating is not merely its obvious parallels to the loyalty oaths and informant culture of the 1950s — though these are striking enough to make even the most historically illiterate observer queasy — but rather the craven manner in which Berkeley’s administrators have genuflected before federal authority. They claim, with the sort of hand-wringing one expects from Pontius Pilate’s PR team, that they were compelled to comply, that systemwide legal counsel left them no choice, that they were merely following orders.

One need not be fluent in twentieth-century European history to recognize the moral bankruptcy of this defense.

Consider the Kafkaesque particulars: the named individuals were not informed of the specific charges against them, were not told who had accused them, and were afforded no opportunity to confront their accusers or mount a defense. Normal complaint procedures were simply suspended, cast aside like so much inconvenient paperwork.

This is not due process. It is a star chamber proceeding dressed up in the drab bureaucratese of compliance and oversight.

Among those named is Judith Butler, a Jewish scholar of international renown whose work on ethics, politics, and identity has earned her a place among the most influential thinkers of our age. Butler didn’t mince words: “It’s obviously equating political expression on Palestine with antisemitism. It cannot be the case that to support Palestinian rights is itself antisemitic.”

Butler’s inclusion on this list — she who has dedicated her career to examining questions of oppression and state violence — exposes the cynical conflation at the heart of this entire squalid affair.

To oppose the policies of the Israeli government, to express solidarity with Palestinian suffering, to question the moral dimensions of occupation and collective punishment: these positions, held by countless Jews and non-Jews alike, are now being weaponized as evidence of antisemitism itself. This is not merely an Orwellian inversion of language; it is an assault on the very possibility of political discourse.

600 international scholars have condemned the disclosure.

If criticism of state policy can be transmuted into bigotry by administrative fiat, then we have entered a realm where words mean whatever power requires them to mean. The Trump administration, never one to let a crisis of its own making go to waste, has seized upon campus protests over Gaza as an opportunity to exact ideological conformity from institutions it regards with suspicion and contempt.

That Berkeley’s administrators should collaborate in this endeavor is a betrayal that would make Judas Iscariot blush.

The implications extend far beyond the 160 individuals named. International students now face the prospect of deportation for the thought-crime of opposing a foreign government’s military actions. Adjunct faculty — already among the most precarious members of the academic workforce — must now weigh their employment prospects against their constitutional right to political expression.

Graduate students conducting research on Middle Eastern politics must wonder whether their scholarship might land them on some federal watchlist.

This is how institutional cowardice metastasizes into a general climate of fear.

Butler put it plainly: “There are going to be severe consequences for people, especially non-citizens, international students, part-time faculty. We’re talking about deportation, we’re talking about loss of employment, we’re talking about being surveilled.”

One might ask what became of Berkeley’s famous commitment to academic freedom, that principle which supposedly distinguishes universities from propaganda mills and re-education camps. The answer, it seems, is that academic freedom is a luxury to be enjoyed only when it poses no inconvenience to those in power. When federal investigators come calling, when the Department of Education threatens funding or regulatory consequences, suddenly those lofty principles evaporate like morning mist.

What remains is the timid calculus of self-preservation and institutional survival.

The Trump administration insisted that names not be redacted in the documents.

Let that sink in for a moment. The federal government didn’t want anonymized data or statistical summaries. They wanted names. Specific, identifiable human beings to target. And Berkeley handed them over without so much as a courtesy warning to those whose lives they were placing under the microscope.

The faculty groups, labor unions, and student organizations now mobilizing in resistance deserve our admiration and support. They understand what Berkeley’s administrators apparently do not: that a university worth the name must be willing to defend its members against governmental overreach, even — especially — when doing so carries a cost.

To argue, as university officials have, that they had no choice but to comply is to abdicate the very responsibility that gives academic institutions their moral legitimacy.

California State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez joined the chorus of critics, expressing alarm over the lack of transparency and the risks posed to individuals, particularly non-citizens. Faculty groups have pointed out — correctly — that the university was not legally required to name individuals in such probes. They chose to. They made a decision, and they made the wrong one.

Let us be clear about what is happening here.

The Trump administration, having identified pro-Palestinian activism as a convenient target, has launched a campaign to intimidate, punish, and silence dissent on campus. That this campaign wraps itself in the language of civil rights enforcement — deploying allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against Jews and non-Jews alike who dare to question Israeli policy — adds a layer of obscene irony to the proceedings.

And Berkeley, rather than resisting this transparently authoritarian maneuver, has chosen to play the role of helpful collaborator.

History will not judge this moment kindly.

Future students touring Berkeley’s campus will doubtless be told about the Free Speech Movement, about Mario Savio standing atop a police car and declaring that there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you cannot take part. They will be less likely to hear about September 2025, when that same institution compiled lists of names for a government investigation into political expression.

Some betrayals are too embarrassing to commemorate.

The test of any institution’s commitment to principle arrives not in times of comfort and consensus, but precisely when holding to those principles becomes costly and difficult. Berkeley has failed that test spectacularly. In doing so, it has forfeited any claim to moral seriousness and revealed itself to be exactly what its harshest critics have long suspected: an institution more concerned with self-preservation than with the defense of the values it purports to champion.

One can only hope that the faculty, students, and staff now organizing in resistance will succeed in reclaiming their university from the administrators who have so thoroughly disgraced it. They deserve better than to have their names handed over to political inquisitors by leaders too cowardly to defend them.

We all do.

Other UC campuses may have also handed over names without informing those involved.

The precedent being set here extends far beyond Berkeley, far beyond the UC system, indeed far beyond the academy itself. If universities — institutions explicitly chartered to foster independent thought and protect unpopular speech — will not stand against governmental efforts to police political expression, then who will?

If academic administrators will compile lists of names for federal investigators based on “alleged” incidents of wrongthink, what principle could possibly restrain them from further collaboration in future campaigns of intimidation?

These are not rhetorical questions. They demand answers that Berkeley’s leadership has shown itself utterly incapable of providing.

In their silence, in their compliance, in their pathetic appeals to legal necessity, they have written an epitaph for their own institution’s credibility. One hopes it was worth it.