Judith Butler is one of 160 faculty, students, and staff members at UC Berkeley whose name the University of California has turned over to the Trump administration to help with the federal government’s investigation into alleged antisemitism on the Berkeley campus.

Let’s slow that statement down so we can understand its components more clearly.

Since February, Donald Trump’s Department of Education (DOE) has been investigating universities, including Berkeley and other University of California (UC) campuses, for their handling of alleged antisemitism on their campuses. In March, the Justice Department announced a separate but parallel investigation of the UC campuses.

In July, a House congressional committee called three university leaders to testify about alleged antisemitism on their campuses. One of the summoned was the chancellor of the City University of New York or CUNY (I’ll come back to that). Another was the chancellor of Berkeley. All three were put through the ringer by a group of rabid Republican representatives. None showed much resistance or said much to defend the rights of faculty, students, or staff.

At the same time, the Trump administration has been withholding a half-billion dollars in federal research grants from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), which the president of the entire UC system, James Milliken, former chancellor of CUNY (I’ll come back to that), is trying desperately to get back.

So when the Department of Education demanded that Berkeley turn over the names, UC complied. That happened, according to various press reports, on August 18 — nearly a month ago.

Since then, Berkeley’s top lawyer has sent individual letters to each of the 160 faculty, students, and staff — including Butler — informing them that their names have been handed over to the Trump administration.

But what does that mean? Handing over names? It has a menacing ring, but it’s easy to lose sight of actuality amid the aura.

According to Berkeley’s lawyer, the Department of Education has “required production of comprehensive documents, including files and reports related to alleged antisemitic incidents.” Because the DOE investigations is ongoing, the lawyer adds, “the University may be subject to additional production obligations.”

When UC hands over names, in other words, they are not just handing over a list of names and nothing else. They are handing over — sorry, “producing” — “comprehensive documents, including files and reports” that, for whatever reason, involve or mention the names of these individuals. Because of “additional production obligations” — love that language; as if they’re a photocopy shop — UC may have to produce many more such documents.

According to a Berkeley spokesperson, these documents may even involve only these individuals’ “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism” at Berkeley. Got that? Just their “potential connection” to those alleged incidents.

As Butler explains in various articles, none of these individuals who have received a letter has the slightest idea what specific conduct, action, or statement they are being alleged to have committed, done, or made (though they have an idea that whatever it is, it involves Palestine). Indeed, as the Berkeley spokesperson makes clear, it may simply be that the names of these faculty, staff, or students have only a “potential connection” to reports of other people’s alleged antisemitism.

We come back to CUNY. For the last several years, the institution has been engaged in multiple investigations of alleged antisemitism on its many campuses in New York. Its chancellor and the institution also have agreed to a definition of antisemitism that could force investigations into anyone from Zohran Mamdani to the former head of the Jewish Theological Seminary to leading human rights experts and organizations in Israel to . . . me.

In the last three months, four adjunct instructors at Brooklyn College have been fired, and administrators have additionally called in for questioning five full-time faculty and one staff member.

At any time, the Trump administration could ask CUNY to hand over “comprehensive documents, including files and reports” that simply involve these individuals’ “potential connection” to reports of alleged antisemitism.

Let’s be clear about the consequences of handing over these comprehensive files.

Butler, in their comments to the press, rightly invokes the experience of McCarthyism. But just so we’re clear about what that means, concretely, let’s remember the specifics of how McCarthyism worked.

Think of it, as the historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her invaluable study Many Are the Crimes, as a network (“Redbaiters, Inc.” is the title of her second chapter) of government officials, private investigators, institutional leaders, and politicians.

The investigations of politically suspect people often begin, under pressure from the government, working with activists in various right-wing organizations, in the private sector, and in what we call civil society, that is, universities, churches, labor unions, nonprofits, and so on.

This being America, the investigations are often subcontracted to other private outfits and law firms, which specialize in these sorts of things, combining a combination of hyperideology and pseudoproceduralism. Reports are generated, kept for safekeeping in the file cabinets — now, computers — of those institutions.

The government — back then, it was invariably the FBI — gets ahold of those reports, which compose part of an individual’s FBI dossier. Those reports circulate back into the private sector and civil society. More important for our purposes, they also wind up in the hands of congressional committees, which often work with those private investigators and professional activists I mentioned above.

From there, you get the famous hearings we remember from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), McCarthy’s committee, and other committees. Plus the intense media coverage, which, if it hasn’t happened already, ruins people’s lives. Not to mention all kinds of other collateral effects — passports revoked (Paul Robeson), employment denied, possible criminal trials and punishments (if you refuse to answer questions or happen to slip up and commit perjury), and more. Today we’d have to add the very real possibility of violence or, at a minimum, sustained harassment and threats.

All of this, we should remember, because of one’s exercise of political speech. Back then, the speech could have been anything from voicing support for the Soviet Union to advocating war against fascism prematurely (that was a thing) to organizing to desegregate the blood supply of the Red Cross (that, too, was a thing). Today it could mean, as Mamdani reminded us last weekend at Brooklyn College, standing up for the basic human rights of Palestinians.

Any of us on college campuses has reason, in other words, to be concerned about these campus investigations of alleged antisemitism; the fact that Berkeley has handed over files on Butler and 159 other faculty, staff, and students; what might come of it; and whether something similar is happening in our own academic institutions. Or has happened already.

In my book on fear, I argued that regimes of fear critically depend on two types of individuals: careerists and collaborators. Today the word we hear is “complicity.” What all of these words are meant to suggest is that regimes of fear are never simply top-down affairs. They have a strong bottom-up component as well.

Unfortunately, in our discourse today, including on the Left, that bottom-up element is often construed to be a mob of racist randos on social media or rubes in the red states. But that’s a comfort and a conceit. The truth is that collaborators are particular agents, trusted with discrete responsibility and concrete power at various levels, in multiple institutions, making choices, sometimes for the best of reasons, with consequences that they may not intend but that are likely to result anyway.