Articles of Distraction

[Angrboda]

Brower regularly spoke out during the first year of Israel’s war in Gaza as protests mounted on Gonzaga’s campus and beyond. She joined protests calling for Palestinians’ rights, called out Gonzaga’s connections to defense contractors, and spoke at a campus walkout where she praised students’ “moral clarity”.

But tensions around her activism were escalating. Someone ripped off signs she had put outside her office reading “peace and liberation for all” and “let Gaza live”. She caught campus security taking photos of her office, leading to a heated exchange. Colleagues she did not personally know accused her of “Holocaust denial” on faculty email lists. A sticker affixed to her office door called her an “extremist”.

Then in December 2024, while she was off for winter break, Brower received an email from the university’s Office of Inclusive Excellence notifying her that a colleague had filed a complaint accusing her of violating institutional policy and that the university would conduct “a prompt, thorough, and impartial investigation of these allegations”.

When Brower pressed the administration for details of the allegations raised against her, the administrator who contacted her denied her request. “I was completely in the dark,” she added.

The interview took place nearly a month later, and to Brower, it felt hostile and deeply uncomfortable. “I was told at the very start, you are presumed innocent, basically until proven guilty,” she recalled. “But the experience of going through the process felt as if they were presuming guilt from the get-go.”

It was not until the investigation was closed in July that Brower was read the charges she had faced. It turned out the complainant had accused her of antisemitism for attending a student-run protest in which other speakers used the word “genocide” in reference to Israel’s actions in Gaza. They complained that she had shared with a faculty mailing list a letter signed by hundreds of Gonzaga students accusing the university of having fallen into a “sinister trap of division, silence, and censorship” over the war – phrasing that the complainant claimed was antisemitic. And they pointed to another letter signed by 70 faculty members criticizing the university’s response to student protests, which Brower forwarded to the same list at a time “too close” to the anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, she was told.

The university should have quickly concluded that “this is not a claim worth investigating”, Brower said of the allegations. Instead, she said they tried to use the complaint “as a sort of backdoor mechanism to shut me up”.

When she sat down for her interview, Brower quickly concluded that the investigator assigned to her case had “very little understanding of the conflict between Israel and Palestine or the ideological conflict about how we talk about these things in the US”.

According to Brower, notes by an attorney who joined her at the meeting and a summary of the interview provided by the university, the investigator asked whether Brower had spoken about the “Jewish people as committing genocide” – to which she replied that she had used the word “genocide” in reference to the Israeli government’s actions and that she would never say “a people” are committing genocide. “They asked me questions that intentionally conflated Jewish people with Israel,” Brower said, suggesting the investigator did not have a grasp of the issues at the heart of the matter. “They did this thing that made it very difficult to clearly answer questions – I think because the investigator themselves didn’t really understand what they were investigating.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...tisemitism