When Andrea Brower was hired two years ago as the lead instructor for Gonzaga University’s solidarity and social justice program, she thought she had landed a dream job. Brower was tasked with “mentoring students in their social justice pursuits” at the private, liberal arts university in eastern Washington state. The school’s Jesuit mission highlighted a commitment to diversity, global engagement and “solidarity with the poor and vulnerable” – a perfect fit for Brower, who had come to academia by way of grassroots, environmental activism in her native Hawaii.
Brower felt at first that her activist credentials were welcome, but when she started organizing around issues on campus – criticizing the treatment of adjuncts and rising administrator salaries and speaking out against the university’s investments in fossil fuels – she began to run into opposition from university administrators.
But it was after she began to protest against Israel’s war in Gaza and criticize Gonzaga’s investments in weapons manufacturers that her troubles really started. Last year, a colleague Brower had never met filed a formal complaint accusing her of antisemitism. It took eight months for the university to conclude that the allegations were unsubstantiated.
The months-long ordeal ultimately led Brower to resign from her position rather than work for an institution increasingly willing to “repress critical thought and dissent”, she wrote in her resignation letter, which she made public on Thursday. “I can bear the harassment, the bullying, the character slander, but what I will not tolerate is being constricted from doing honest, rigorous teaching,” she said in an exclusive interview before she resigned. “I don’t know how I’m going to teach in an environment where I know I am being so closely watched and surveilled by administrators.”
A spokesperson for Gonzaga did not answer a detailed list of questions, saying the university “does not discuss or disclose details about any person’s employment”.
Brower’s case is hardly isolated. As the Trump administration has turned civil rights legislation into a cudgel to root out progressive politics on US campuses, with billions of dollars in federal funding on the line, pro-Palestinian professors have increasingly been caught in the crossfire. But while the government’s crackdown on universities has drawn widespread condemnation, a parallel campaign targeting specific faculty members has received far less attention. Often initiated by actors seizing on the political climate and the vulnerability of universities, accusations against professors of antisemitism have come at a great professional and personal cost for many.
At the heart of the campaign against both universities and faculty are civil rights investigations over alleged discrimination. Often, they invoke Title VI, the provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funds, as most universities do. During his first term, Trump expanded Title VI protections to Jewish students – on the basis that while religion is not a protected category under the act, students’ ethnic or ancestral background is. Trump also encouraged institutions to refer to a controversial definition that conflates some criticism of Israel with antisemitism when applying the law.
Since the beginning of Israel’s war in Gaza, the federal government has launched 99 antisemitism investigations into universities – with a steep increase following Trump’s inauguration, according to the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa), which has been tracking them for a forthcoming study. Already, leading universities have reached settlements with the administration – including millions in payouts and a slew of measures ostensibly aimed at fighting antisemitism, even as a federal judge ruled last week in a suit brought by Harvard that the administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities”.
Since October 2023, another 28 lawsuits have been filed against universities by students or outside groups accusing them of violating civil rights law by enabling antisemitism on campuses, and some have already resulted in multimillion-dollar settlements.
As they have come under growing pressure, some schools have responded, advocates say, by throwing faculty under the bus – including by launching lengthy investigations over allegations they might have dismissed in the past.
“Sometimes administrators are even saying that this is something we would normally be able to dismiss out of hand, but we are under this Title VI investigation and therefore we have to go through these steps,” said Isaac Kamola, who leads the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and has been supporting many of the targeted faculty. “And so what you have is this big political infrastructure and coordinated rightwing efforts to say, we don’t like that individual … and the administrations are basically not able to defend them.”
It’s hard to know exactly how many professors have faced internal investigations over their pro-Palestinian speech, but in recent months, universities have rushed to hire Title VI coordinators to handle the surge of antisemitism claims raised against faculty members. “Dozens” of educators have been affected, said Anna Feder, an organizer with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network, a nationwide coalition of educators who have come under fire for their advocacy.
Feder is a curator who was laid off from her role at Emerson College’s visual media arts department last year over, she believes, a dispute surrounding her decision to screen the documentary Israelism, which follows young Jewish Americans becoming disillusioned with Zionism. (In April, Feder sued Emerson for wrongful termination, alleging that she was targeted for her “personal political activism”. A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on personnel matters and pending litigation but said that the college “unequivocally denies any allegation of wrongdoing or retaliation”.)
While some high-profile cases received significant attention – like those of Columbia professor Katherine Franke and Muhlenberg College professor Maura Finkelstein, both tenured professors who were forced out and fired, respectively, over their pro-Palestinian speech – most professors dealing with antisemitism allegations are getting far less attention, Feder noted.
“People don’t understand how pervasive it is, and how most people are isolated when it happens,” she said.
‘Making this up as they go’
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.”
As she awaited resolution of her case, Brower wrote an email to university administrators asking what the university planned to do to protect her. The university’s response came days later – offering little guidance but including phone numbers for campus security and a mental health line “for the anxious feelings and concerns about your personal safety”.
“It was highly insulting, and kind of shows their ignorance as to what was happening,” she said. “Most universities are kind of making this up as they go, and that tends not to fare well for those of us who are being accused.”
‘Colleagues are taking note’
Jewish faculty have also faced antisemitism investigations. Judith Norman, a tenured professor of philosophy at Trinity University, a small, private liberal arts institution in San Antonio, Texas, had been involved in pro-Palestinian organizing for more than 25 years as a member of the local Jewish Voice for Peace chapter. Norman’s advocacy was not always welcomed by colleagues and administrators but she faced no significant opposition to it until the current war in Gaza.
Since then, the university has received half a dozen antisemitism complaints against her and launched two Title VI investigations in response, she said. While the university did not tell Norman who filed the complaints, at least one appears to have come through an anonymous whistleblower tip line. One stemmed from a social media post in which Norman shared a nationwide call to “Drop Hillel”, the pro-Israel organization active on many campuses – while others, she said, were false, including one accusation that she had been involved in an incident in which students wrote pro-Palestinian slogans in chalk on the sidewalk and another that she had invited speakers to campus “who denied Jewish indigeneity in Israel”.
In Norman’s case, none of the accusations stuck – even after the university hired an officer who spent dozens of hours on her case and produced a 60-page report ultimately clearing her of all charges. (Norman was allowed to read the report but not keep a copy of it.) Norman credited the investigator with being “thorough and unbiased” and said her case was a “best-case scenario”.
A spokesperson for Trinity did not answer questions about Norman’s case but wrote in a statement that “in accordance with our obligations under Title VI, we are committed to promptly and effectively addressing any harassment based on race, color, or national origin to help ensure a safe and inclusive environment for all”.
“I think Title VI is a good thing in general. People who are discriminated against ought to have a formal process, for their protection, and I’m glad that the university takes Title VI seriously,” Norman said.
But she warned that the specter of Title VI investigations was creating a chilling effect on faculty. “My colleagues have taken note of what’s happening to me,” she said, adding that many are young and untenured. “The degree of intimidation that is caused by just the fact that I’m being dragged through these processes is absolutely tangible.”
While the formal investigations left her nervous to speak in class, wondering who might be taking notes to use against her, she said she had no plans to cut back her advocacy. “I’ve been to Gaza,” she said, “and there is no way I’m going to shut up about Gaza.”
Litigating antisemitism
Other professors are being taken directly to courts, which are being asked to litigate questions around when anti-Zionism crosses into antisemitism.
Michel DeGraff, a linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been embroiled in a nearly two-year, contentious dispute with the university after he proposed teaching a class about language and decolonization in Palestine, Israel and Haiti. (DeGraff was born and raised in Haiti, and the country is his primary area of study.) The linguistics department rejected the class, citing DeGraff’s lack of expertise on the subject; he ultimately taught the course as an unsanctioned lecture series, but the conflict with both the department and the university led to him being temporarily pushed out of the linguistics department and denied a scheduled raise.
In June, the Brandeis Center, a legal group fighting alleged antisemitism on campuses, sued both MIT and DeGraff, accusing him of “harassing” an Israeli researcher and a Jewish student, and university leadership of turning MIT into a “breeding ground of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hate”. The suit seeks punitive and emotional damages.
DeGraff’s dispute with the student began after the latter took to social media to denounce the “extremely dangerous rhetoric” in the professor’s lecture series. According to the complaint, DeGraff posted on Instagram about the Zionist “mind infection” and accused well-known “Jewish student life organizations” such as Hillel and Chabad of “fund[ing]” this “mind infection”. The complaint also alleges that DeGraff posted the researcher’s name and image on social media, revealing that he had served in the Israeli military (which is compulsory for Israeli citizens).
The subsequent exchange, over social media posts and department-wide emails, was “so extreme and intolerable that it forced [the student] to leave MIT”, the complaint further alleged. In the lawsuit, the Brandeis Center also argued that “Zionist is often a codeword for Jew”. The center is a leading force behind the ongoing push to punish alleged antisemitism on campuses, and is behind dozens of Title VI complaints, according to Mesa’s forthcoming analysis. In addition to MIT, the group has sued Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard.
The student, William Sussman, did not respond to a request for comment, while the researcher, Lior Alon, referred questions to the Brandeis Center. Paul Eckles, a senior attorney at the center, said: “We feel very confident in the claims we’ve asserted and we’ll have our day in court.”
A spokesperson for MIT declined to comment on DeGraff’s case, citing policies on individual personnel matters, but said that the university “will defend itself in court regarding the allegations raised in the lawsuit”. The spokesperson also cited the November 2023 statement by the university president, Sally Kornbluth, that “antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world. We cannot let it poison our community.”
DeGraff denied that his actions constituted antisemitism. He cited multiple academics, including the Israeli philologist Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a guest speaker in DeGraff’s series, who used the phrase “mind infection” in regards to how Israeli children are taught to view their Arab neighbors. He also noted that a related concept – that of “viruses of the mind”, a reference to how hate narratives “spread like viruses” – had a long history in academia. And he argued that the researcher he is accused of doxing was a “public figure” who had made a number of media appearances condemning pro-Palestinian protests at MIT.
Eckles, the Brandeis attorney, argued that DeGraff’s speech “rises above just mere political discourse” – and his combative style has earned DeGraff many critics among his colleagues.
But DeGraff sees the fight over words as part of his job as a linguist, and takes particular issue with MIT’s leadership and the linguistics department – where he arrived in the 1990s, drawn by the scholarship of the linguist and pro-Palestinian advocate Noam Chomsky – for failing to recognize what he called the “weaponizing” of language.
“Language is such a powerful tool of liberation, I felt that this was a place for me to be,” DeGraff said. “I’m trying to uphold Chomsky’s principles, for intellectuals to be responsible towards the truth.”
Shifting tides
Brower was hired at a time when universities catered to students increasingly passionate about social justice. But the experience of being investigated over her advocacy for Palestinians’ rights has led her to the conclusion that that commitment was hollow.
In July, Brower was cleared of any violations of university policy. But in a meeting closing her case – in which she finally learned what she had been accused of – the administrator in charge of the process told her that a number of “concerns” about her conduct would be referred to the school’s leadership for “intervention”, even though they did not amount to formal violations. They refused to provide those concerns in writing but indicated that they related to Brower’s lack of “understanding” of Israel and Palestine, and to the allegations that she created conflict on campus and made Jewish students and faculty feel unsafe.
The experience left Brower deeply disillusioned with her university, leading to her decision to quit. Although she struggled with the decision to leave her students, she concluded that Gonzaga was not an institution where she could do “meaningful work”, she said. In her resignation letter, she offered to continue to mentor her students informally this coming semester.
“If we cannot speak honestly, clearly and loudly about the genocidal starvation of children – or at minimum support our brave students who are – what is our role as scholars?” she wrote. “Now is not the time for quiet.”
