- Ria Raniwala & Ingrid Lu | Staff
- Oct 8, 2025 (DailyCal.org)
UC President James B. Milliken released a statement Oct. 3 addressing the university’s cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which included UC Berkeley’s release of about 160 student, staff and faculty names.
The letter claims that in the course of an investigation into campus’s response to complaints of antisemitic discrimination, the Office of Civil Rights, or OCR, demanded unredacted case files and police reports. Milliken said UC requests to keep documents anonymized were denied by the OCR, and a June agreement was made to release the unredacted files “as a last resort.”
A supporting FAQ released by the UC Office of the President, or UCOP, clarified that the university did not produce a “list of individuals,” although the files included names and, in some instances, contact details of complainants, respondents and witnesses. However, further information on the details of the original request was not provided in the FAQ, and UCOP declined to provide further details about the release in an email to The Daily Californian.
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“If the school is giving over more information than it needs to, the chilling effect of those disclosures is going to be greater than necessary and that would be a problem,” said UC Davis School of Law professor Brian Soucek. “I don’t know if that’s the case because we haven’t had enough transparency to be able to independently evaluate that. We’re just left having to take the administration at its word.”
Campus policy says privacy laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, typically protect student records and information from being disclosed without consent. However, UCOP claimed that this disclosure did not violate FERPA, as the law allows records to be passed to the federal government “in certain contexts.”
UCOP’s FAQ also denied that the university “capitulated” to the federal government, an accusation leveled against UC administration by academics and commentators after UC Berkeley’s release of names. It claimed that compliance with the federal government is a legal obligation unrelated to politics or party lines.
Soucek noted that although the university must comply with all federal agencies at the risk of losing vital funding, he doubts the nature of OCR’s request.
In the letter, Milliken claimed universities receiving federal funding have complied with federal oversight from agencies such as OCR “for decades.” However, Soucek noted that while the university would have to comply with a legitimate request for unredacted, de-anonymized information, OCR wouldn’t necessarily need personal information from particular complainants to investigate the campus response.
While Milliken’s letter states the most recent investigation will not target individuals and solely focus on campus complaint response, Soucek did not think “any reasonable person should believe the government is conducting these investigations fully in good faith.”
“The problem here is that we have a set of investigations around the country that are clearly retaliatory in nature — clearly aimed at targeting the administration’s perceived enemies,” Soucek said. “The information used in those investigations is being handed off for improper purposes like deporting people on the basis of their protected speech.”
Along with Catherine Lhamon, executive director of the Edley Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law, Soucek will host a talk Thursday to “grapple” with the nearly 160 names that campus released.
They aim to address both the background on the investigation and faculty concerns about its ramifications, as well as the protections offered to university employees by the university’s policy on academic freedom.
“There are responsibilities that come with academic freedom, but the protections are incredibly clear,” Soucek said. “It might be that within these documents that were turned over, there are complaints about professors … that are clearly protected by academic freedom.”
Ria Raniwala
Deputy News Editor
