1 May—Once upon a time when young people went to college it was to get a liberal or occupational—usually professional—education and it was assumed they’d abide by the rules and regulations of their colleges. So where the hell do college students—not just the pro-Hamas ones currently hogging the headlines—get off these days telling their schools what to do? The incorrigible blockheads evidently don’t realize—or at any rate don’t care—that that’s not what college education is about.

Certainly no college or university is beyond reproach on many levels and for many reasons. But the revolting young snots presumably are attending college to learn, not to make demands that have nothing at all to do with their education.

If students don’t like the way the colleges they’re fortunate enough to be attending are investing their parents’ tuition dollars, for instance, they have every right to complain about it. And even though it’s really none of their business as long s they’re being educated, the students also have a right to suggest changes in investment policy or whatever else may be bugging them.

Like everyone else, students have the right to suggest anything they damn well please. But college students in particular have absolutely no right to demand anything of their schools other than the education the schools are supposed, expected, and contracted to provide.

Dialogue is great. In fact it’s a valuable, essential part of the education process and experience. For mature, intelligent, and reasonable people, anyway. So it’s not entirely inappropriate that Brown University has opted to dialogue (yes, it’s also a verb) with the anti-Israel students, even though the university is obviously doing it under duress. Let’s hope the Brown administration doesn’t cave to the students. But we expect it to.

In all events, the civil disobedience and criminal conduct college kids all over the world are clearly committing—and evidently enjoying—are pathologically antisocial and totally unacceptable.

Virtually all protests are at best little more than exercises in ego-driven futility, wastes of time that serve no purpose other than allowing the protesters to vent their hostility and frustration within the comfort and safety (so to speak) of like-minded mobs. Demonstrations in support of whatever it may be are no less wasteful of time, energy, and other resources; but at least they seldom turn violent.

Word is that many of the college campus kerfuffles have been and are being incited by rabble-rousers not affiliated with the besieged institutions. While that shouldn’t affect the non-students’ right to organize and demonstrate peacefully, it does expose them to civil and criminal charges including but not limited to trespass.

If the aggrieved students don’t like what their colleges are doing, they’re free to transfer to such other colleges that may admit them. But if they turn from nasty words to nasty deeds, they should be expelled and even arrested, charged, and prosecuted.

So it’s refreshing and encouraging that Columbia University and the University of Connecticut, among other besieged institutions, have called in police to deal with protesters, even non-violent ones who have nevertheless gone beyond legal—and reasonable—limits in expressing their displeasure with whatever it may be.

But will those truculent twerps be prosecuted like any other criminals?