Grace Bruton | Student Life

Chancellor Martin speaks at the Day of Dialogue and Action in 2019.

Chancellor Andrew Martin faced criticism Wednesday from one of the University’s most prominent first amendment law professors, Gregory Magarian, who argued that the administration’s silence on Islamophobia and racism caused “far greater harm” than senior Fadel Alkilani’s initial removal of 9/11 memorial flags and ultimately undermined the University’s support for free speech.

Magarian’s critique comes as students and student groups continue to call on the University to address online hate and threats and as some students went on an academic strike Wednesday, skipping class or attending remotely out of fear for their safety or in solidarity with students who have expressed fears for their safety.

“Putting up these flags as a way of commemorating 9/11 and making a political statement about 9/11 — there’s no question that that is an act of speech, that that is expressive, that it carries a message,” Magarian, Washington University’s Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, said in an interview with Student Life Monday evening. “And I think there’s no also no question that as a category, as a phenomenon, taking down the flags in opposition to the display is also expressive.”

Magarian noted that the widespread hate speech following Alkilani’s counterprotest, and the way in which it was allowed to proliferate for days without rebuke from administrators, was likely to have a chilling effect on the future atmosphere of free speech on campus.

“If I had an identity that subjected me to frequent or likely instances of abuse based on my identity, I would feel less free and less comfortable expressing myself in any kind of controversial way, knowing the sort of blowback that this incident got,” he said.

To cultivate an open exchange of ideas on campus — not just in theory, but in practice — Magarian said that administrators like Martin should be clear in their condemnation of Islamophobic threats.

“If the University wants to do something right now to sort of maintain and nurture its commitment to the environment for free speech, it should be saying, ‘We will not tolerate any attacks on our students based on any aspect of their identities, and we completely stand against that kind of that kind of abuse,’” he said.

Magarian wrote in an opinion essay Wednesday that the University’s decision to “embrace” the College Republicans’ perspective on 9/11 and “ignore” the attacks Alkilani had experienced would “cause far greater harm than Alkilani’s errant action to the culture of free speech and open debate on our campus.” The University did not need to endorse the politics of the College Republicans’ flag display in order to condemn Alkilani’s behavior, he added.

“The University’s statements in the wake of Alkilani’s actions tacitly endorse the College Republicans’ political message, mainly by parroting the College Republicans’ line that the flag display was a politically neutral memorial,” he wrote.

The College Republicans have claimed that the placement of the flags was apolitical, writing in a Monday statement that “the anniversary of 9/11 is not a time for political theater, but rather for unity.”

“The 9/11 flag planting is not a partisan or a political event; it is a memorial for nearly 3,000 Americans who will never get to see, hold or hug their loved ones again,” College Republicans president sophomore Nick Rodriguez told Student Life in a statement Saturday night.

However, Magarian disagreed, saying that even if Alkilani’s viewpoint was a minority one, it should not be erased.

“The point of what Alkilani did, whether or not we agree with his methods, should not be lost: a lot of people feel differently about this,” Magarian said. “This is a very contentious, very contestable political message — the idea that 9/11 is all about national unity and the national interest, the idea that we should focus only on the deaths that occurred on 9/11 and not in commemorating this event talk about things that happened subsequently, that Islamophobia need be no part of the discussion and for that matter, the symbolic rendering of each of these lost lives in the form of an American flag.”

Magarian pointed out that more than 10% of the victims of the 9/11 attacks were citizens of countries other than America, representing more than 90 countries in total. “This display renders those non-U.S. people with American flags, commemorates them with American flags, and I think a great many of those families would probably find that pretty objectionable and pretty reductionist,” he said. “So there is powerful political content here.”

Magarian emphasized in his article that the University should have acknowledged the political nature of the flag planting. “Making [Sunday night’s University] statement without acknowledging how the flag display itself might have impeded other individuals’ ability to commemorate their losses and process their trauma constitutes an endorsement of the College Republicans’ contestable political portrayal of 9-11,” Magarian wrote. “By endorsing one side in a political debate, the University deploys its power in a way that discredits the other side.”

In spring 2019, Martin announced that he would be making fewer University-wide statements, focusing only on issues that “affect our core mission as an educational institution.”

Martin’s choice to comment on Alkilani’s counterprotest — but not the violent threats then lobbied at him and other Muslim students — changed the balance of speech, Magarian argued. “Now we’re not just talking about a fair marketplace of ideas among a bunch of autonomous individuals and organizations, all of which have the same opportunity to present their messages,” he said. “Now, instead, we’re talking about one group acting with the support of the University to project one powerful patriotic message in a way that sort of flattens other messages. And that makes counter speech — which is ideally what we want people like Alkilani to be engaging in — makes it more difficult.”

By definitively taking a side, the chancellor’s statement “denied or elided any kind of specific contestable political content to the College Republicans’ display, cast the College Republicans as the victims, cast people who might be offended by the removal of the flags as the people whose feelings counted — as opposed to people who might be put out or offended or just emotionally affected in some negative way by the placement of the flags to begin with,” Magarian said.

An email from the Center for Diversity and Inclusion Wednesday afternoon was the first student body-wide communication from the administration this week to discuss Islamophobia and other racism. “The Center for Diversity and Inclusion stands in solidarity with our students impacted by Islamophobia, xenophobia, Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, Anti-South Asian, Anti-Sikh, Anti-Hindu and Anti-BIPOC racism,” the CDI wrote. “There is no place for prejudice, bigotry and discrimination in our community. You — all of your identities — belong here and we will remain steadfast in our mission of supporting our Black, Brown, Indigenous and minoritized students.”

Martin did not mention Islamophobia or other racism in his message to the community Sunday evening and has not addressed the community since. Deans of each individual college sent emails to their students Wednesday afternoon, all containing some similar language and the forwarded CDI email.
There has not been any other student body-wide communication from the University discussing Islamophobia or other racism.

In an email to Student Life responding to questions about the situation Tuesday morning, Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications Julie Flory wrote that “Chancellor Martin has spoken out many times to affirm that there is no place in our community for hate or bigotry and that as an institution, we stand firmly against hate, racism and discrimination in any form.”

Through Flory, Martin declined to comment on Magarian’s critique.