Political protests should not be allowed on college campuses if they disrupt students from attending classes in a normal atmosphere. College students are adults and like other adults not attending college their protests should be peaceable and held in places that won’t disturb business and government activity. Political protests should instead be safely held in public spaces with permits to assemble or march.
Student protests on campus are stupid. It is as stupid as it would be to for students to hold disruptive protests in front of Ford, GMC or Apple Corp every time there is some foreign event that students are emotional about that is entirely unrelated to Ford, GMC or Apple Core. Only of there is some on-campus element to protest such as janitors not cleaning bathrooms well enough to satisfy privileged students should upper class protesters even consider disrupting campus life.
College is very expensive and many students are poor. They cannot afford to have their studies interrupted without substantial harm and risk to themselves financially. In fact for many poor students attending classes on a schedule is a once in a lifetime opportunity that they can barely afford. Sometimes they need to finish their college program using a credit card to buy food. Students often don’t qualify for food stamps if they are full time students. Partisan Palestinian protesters, or any other political partisans should not target college students for victimization because they don’t like a college or some foreign political activity. They should instead let poor students attend classes without disruption so the non-protesting students can get a job and repay their student loans.
Young people may lack wisdom and be easily duped politically. Many change their political opinions as they age and become more conservative. Education though, if it of quality lasts a lifetime if it is reinforced with lifetime learning. Colleges and students should be allowed to proceed regardless of extraneous politics. When college students to choose to protest it should not be on the campuses that prepare students for a lifetime ahead. Instead they could assemble in a field someplace like Woodstock and boycott classes, as if they were a union on strike, and let strikebreakers and independents continue to work on making academic progress.
Obviously students aren’t a union and colleges aren’t employers. Even when unions strike a large business though, they are not allowed to forcibly lock it up by forming barriers to prevent non-participating workers from entering. Yet the radical Palestinian supporters have acted to prevent normal college academic and graduation procedures from taking place, and that is simply wrong.
Graduate students face even worse dangers from on-campus protesters. Grad school is very costly and the financing is not nearly as available as undergraduate work (grades 12-16). I sought financing for graduate school for a couple decades before quitting the search after contracting pneumonia while homeless in Anchorage one winter. In Houston twenty years before I had to drop out of graduate school after a semester because my student loan didn’t arrive- so all I got was debt to repay and no parchment. Graduate school is an entrepreneurial activity and like any start up small business can be terminated by unforeseen disruptive events; plague, famine, pestilence, tornadoes, hurricanes and Palestinian on-campus protesters.
The United States already has experienced a national decline in its student academic scores in comparison to other nations. Retarding college students with mass student protests- and not all protesters are students, by preventing them from peaceably going about academic activities simply shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
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