“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality. It seemed to me that Fohlin was not in the quad to join the students in their protest of the war in Gaza: She was just trying to look out for them.

Other faculty members have been roughed up too. Video showing the arrest of Emory’s philosophy-department chair, Noëlle McAfee, went viral. So did a clip of the Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck getting knocked over and zip-tied. At Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, Steve Tamari, a history professor at nearby Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was filmed being tackled and dragged by police; Tamari says he was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand. During a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the sociology professor Samer Alatout was detained; he says police inflicted the head gash that was visible in images circulated on social media.

Though sometimes called “student protests,” students are only some of those participating in the campus demonstrations and occupations of the past three weeks. My university reported that 100 people were arrested on April 27, of which 23 were students and at least four were employees. Various roles are represented at the protests, and those roles bear different meanings. The faculty members whose images have been shared most widely aren’t among the protesters so much as beside them; they’ve been watching over students as their guardians, instead of marching as their peers. This is helicopter protesting, fit for the helicopter-parent generation.

Following her arrest at Emory, Fohlin’s attorney told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she “was not a protester,” but had just come down from her office out of concern for students on the quad. In so doing, she saw authorities wrestling an individual to the ground and approached to intervene: “What are you doing?” she asked the police, appearing to tap one on the back before another officer grabbed her. McAfee told a similar story in a local-television interview: “I saw something going on … A bunch of police had tackled a young person, and threw them on the ground, and were just pummeling them,” she said. McAfee, whose scholarship connects feminist theory to political life, acknowledged the gendered role of protector that she felt she was playing. “The mother in me said, Stop, stop,” she told reporters.

The role of protector isn’t limited to women, of course. Before his detention, Tamari can be seen filming the protesters around him, perhaps as a means of documentation. In a statement issued later, Tamari positioned himself as a participant, but also a peacekeeper: “I joined the student-led protests on Saturday to stop the genocide and support and protect the students.” Alatout, the University of Wisconsin professor, expressed a similar ambition: “My and other faculty and staff’s position is that we are defending the students’ rights,” he said. “To demonstrate and to protest, and that we are defending them.”

Protection has been a theme of the protests. Members of Congress have pressured university presidents to demonstrate that they have done enough to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Disputes about the intention and etymology of campus chants and calls for Intifada, mixed with political motivations quite separate from the real operation of campus life, are also set against a years-long trend to cast safety as a matter of sensation, and sensation as equal to harm.

One timely example: After the Columbia University protests, some law students reportedly called for exams to be canceled, because the events of the week had left them “irrevocably shaken.” To feel unsafe is to be unsafe in the contemporary campus scene, and one’s perception of a slight, or even an act of violence, has become akin to its reality. Professors have played a role in advancing that ethos in their classrooms and offices, in part out of political empathy, in part because they truly care about students and their well-being, and in part because their institutions now demand it.

That situation has now circled back on itself. At UCLA last week, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and other organizations organized a rally on campus—a counterprotest, really, to the pro-Palestinian encampments—to “advocate for the protection of Jewish students,” as David N. Myers, one of the school’s history professors, put it. According to Myers, another, more agitated group of counterprotesters was also present, and came close to instigating a brawl with the anti-war activists. Myers wrote that he and other faculty “inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer.” A few days later, the situation did turn violent, and some among the original student protesters were beaten by a mob, as the police stood aside. At first, police action was creating danger, then its absence did the same. Amid the confusion of today’s campus protests, it can be hard to predict who will be vulnerable to whom at any given time, and when protection can or should be provided.

Clearly students there and then badly needed help, of a sort that faculty could not reasonably provide. In the current college climate, concern for safety is a constant, but rarely modulates above a steady background noise. At the protests, as during the school year, teachers mostly offer their protection as a means of staving off much lesser harms than those delivered by stick-wielding thugs. At Columbia, one professor urged news cameramen not to film students inside the encampment, according to The New York Times, seemingly to guard the students’ reputations.

Columbia professors have been involved in student protests in the past, but they didn’t position themselves like this, as purveyors of moral support. Instead, they played the role of mediators. In 1968, when students occupied several buildings across campus, faculty at one point physically positioned themselves between the protesters and the police—in the interest of bringing the matter to a close. A faculty statement from the time read, in part, “As members of the faculty, we are determined to do everything within our power rapidly to resume the full life of this institution in the firm expectation that our proposals will permit a climate to prevail that will once again allow reason, judgment and order to reign.” That sentiment bears far more resemblance to the goals of today’s administrators and politicians—the restoration of order and resumption of business as usual on campus—than it does to the goals of professors who have intervened in recent weeks to keep students safe.

Today’s protests might look similar to those previous ones when viewed in pictures, but their context is transformed. Students and parents have spent years demanding more and better services on campus, including services to help students feel and be safe and comfortable. Universities have swelled into giant bureaucracies in response to regulatory demands and competition. College life itself, especially at elite private universities, is now consumed by professionalization more than self-discovery, thanks in part to the astronomical cost of attendance. Campuses have become more diverse, making today’s faculty motivations different and more varied than those driving the (whiter, maler) Columbia faculty of ’68, who yearned for reason’s victory. And politics has become more identitarian, giving selfhood greater sway.

In this new context, professors and students have developed a relationship of protection above all others. Faculty have been converted from instructors into personal coaches. Much is gained in this change, including its expression at campus protests; professors such as McAfee and Myers have shown bravery on behalf of students. And yet, something is also lost: By inserting ourselves into students’ lives as guardians of their welfare, we risk failing to protect an important aspect of their intellectual, political, and personal development—namely, their independence.

Recounting the intervention that had led to her arrest at Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck reported saying to the police, “Leave our students alone. They’re students. They’re not criminals.” Like some other faculty, Orleck drew a line at calling in law enforcement, a choice she said was unprecedented in her 34 years at the college. But since Columbia set the precedent to do so, policing itself has become a subject of campus demonstrations. Participants may well be risking arrest by design. At the same time, students seem ambivalent about the degree to which they really are at odds with authority, rather than reliant upon it. At Columbia, one was mocked after demanding “humanitarian aid” in the form of food and water after taking over Hamilton Hall. “I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” she said.

What, exactly, is the nature of that obligation? Attending college is an American coming-of-age ritual, and a means of giving students room to figure out how to live and act in the world. Orleck’s reminder that students are just students undercuts that mission, in a way. It’s both protective and infantilizing. It strips students of their power before they’ve even had a chance to test it out. None of us wants our students or our colleagues to be harmed. But there’s value in learning how it feels to take risks, and to reap their rewards.

Last month, a pro-Palestinian activist stood in front of me on Columbia University’s campus with a sign that read By Any Means Necessary. She smiled. She seemed like a nice person. I am an Israeli graduate student at the university, and I know holding that sign is within her rights. And yet, its message was so painful and disturbing that after that moment, I left New York for a few days.

If I’d had the courage, I would have asked that student, "What exactly do you mean by ‘any means necessary’?” Holding up signs? Leading demonstrations? Or do knives also fall under that category? Guns and rifles as well? Raping and taking civilians hostage? (As of this writing, 133 hostages are still being held in Gaza.) And whom would these means be employed against? Columbia? The Israeli government? Soldiers? Civilians? Children?

Since my return to Columbia, tensions have escalated dramatically. After protesters broke into Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night, the administration sent in the NYPD to evacuate the building and arrest the occupiers. This is the second time such measures have been taken—and they may only intensify the frustration and hostility of all involved. More worrying, this frustration might push more students to believe that “by any means necessary” is the only way to achieve their goals.

At this point, anyone reading this essay might suspect that I am not objective, and they would be absolutely right. Because if you ask me what I think about when I see the words by any means necessary, it is only one thing. I think about Sagi: my best friend, whom I knew since sixth grade, the funniest and kindest person I have ever met.

On the morning of October 7, Sagi Golan woke up at home with his boyfriend, Omer Ohana, whom he was supposed to marry two weeks later. They had already bought their beautiful white suits, and I had bought a plane ticket to the wedding. As a reservist, Sagi immediately headed south, where he fought bravely for hours at Kibbutz Be’eri, saving the lives of innocent adults and children, until he was killed in combat with terrorists. One hundred civilians were killed in Be’eri, and 30 more were taken hostage.

I am a writer who has published short stories and a novel, but the day Sagi was killed, I lost my words. I couldn’t get a plane ticket to Israel for the funeral, so I just showed up at the airport. I was so confused and upset that when the ticketing agent tried to understand why I was trying to get on a plane without a ticket, I said, “My best friend … a wedding … a funeral …” The agent, a complete stranger, asked if he could give me a hug. Half an hour later, he’d arranged a one-way ticket.

I landed an hour before Sagi’s funeral. The flowers that were meant for my best friend's wedding were laid upon his grave.

[Mark Leibovich: House Republicans at the ‘Liberation Camp’]

Back in New York, I barely left my apartment. I barely ate, barely slept. By that time, protests had already become routine on campus, but I was so deep in my own grief that I didn’t even notice. This went on for months. Toward the end of the fall semester, a professor took me aside after class. He told me that in his youth, he’d had friends who spent summers at kibbutzim in Israel, describing the people there as the nicest in the world. Neither he nor his friends were Jewish, but they were captivated by the concept of a cooperative socialist society. “Hearing about the attacks on those kibbutzim on October 7 was deeply painful for me,” he said. “So I can’t even imagine how painful it is for you.”

That professor is a strong critic of the Israeli government and its policies. But in that particular moment, he chose to address only my pain. Although I’m still grieving and will be for a long while, his compassion helped me start to heal, and allowed me to better perceive the suffering of many others, Israelis and Palestinians, whose lives have been shattered since October 7.

As an Israeli, I despise the rhetoric emerging from certain extremist politicians, who have claimed that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza or advocated for a forced deportation of Palestinians. I also believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the Jewish people. His willingness to grant political power and public legitimacy to racist and fascist ideologues is a moral stain on the history of the nation, and I am alarmed by the possibility that Netanyahu would reject a hostage deal and a cease-fire to preserve his own power.

But some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. Indeed, many of their slogans have nothing to do with peace. Almost every day, I hear protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” Growing up in Israel during the early 2000s, I lived through the Second Intifada. I witnessed buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”

Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; on campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading Al-Qassam’s next targets. In the encampment itself, signs hang with small red triangles that might seem like an innocent design choice. Whether the protesters realize it or not, Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israeli targets.

I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Bringing the NYPD onto campus on April 18, when the encampment had just been established, likely contributed to the escalation, and I know that off-campus bad actors, including politicians, are taking advantage of the volatile situation and fueling tensions. Most of the student protesters are peaceful; Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric, and some even laugh and cheer along. I’ve heard Columbia students claim that these incidents are so petty that they are not worth discussing at all. I find myself debating intelligent people who treat reported facts like myths if they don’t align with their narrative.

Universities don’t have to be battlefields. More people, including faculty and students, should speak out against hateful rhetoric that is morally wrong, even if this rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment. Fundamentally, I don’t see how the protesters’ insistence on using the language of violence will contribute to the Palestinian cause, or their own. They have to know that their actions have only strengthened the extreme-right political forces in the U.S. and Israel, who are already using these statements to consolidate more power. Their expressions and actions trample the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who advocate for complexity and compassion. And they further entrench today’s distorted public discourse, which demands complete conformity from people within the same group and zero compassion for those in another.

Despite all the coverage of the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, it can be remarkably difficult to understand what the players are actually saying. On social media, partisans on both sides cherry-pick extreme comments or incidents as a way to suggest that their opponents are comprehensively rotten. Others invoke broadly held values—free speech, peaceful protest, human rights—without explaining how they apply in specific circumstances. And many of the media stories have only worsened the confusion, by employing imprecise and euphemistic language that obscures more than it illuminates.

As a result, the American public remains badly informed about both the war itself and the movement against it, a dynamic that has steadily grown worse as campus protests—and the rate of (sometimes violent) arrests—has intensified. This lack of clarity may be especially damaging to people who both oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and want to see long-term peace—a group long marginalized by Israel hawks and expansionists—but who may also find themselves surprised and troubled by the stated objectives of many of the groups leading the protests. And there is a growing risk, as the backlash to the protests grows both more violent and more litigious, that the extreme claims, demands for ideological purity, and rejection of nonviolence advanced by some of the protest leaders will undermine a movement that many liberals agree is morally urgent.

Here is a sadly typical example of the phenomenon I’m seeing: The Washington Post recently published an article headlined “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives.” The story, by the reporter Pranshu Verma, looked at the organization StopAntisemitism, which, according to the Post’s summary, “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many were swiftly fired.”

But that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality that the Post is reporting. The people featured in this article did not simply criticize Israel or its actions in Gaza. One woman was fired from her job at a branding firm for a video in which she declared that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” (Refusing to say a bad word about a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist group is undoubtedly not the way her firm wanted to be branded.) Another person, a therapist, was caught on video ripping down a poster of Israeli hostages. She subsequently promoted the conspiracy theory that the Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7 were actually kidnapped by their own country. (She said later that she hadn’t meant what she’d said, but that she’d torn down the poster because it used the term “Hamas terrorists,” which undermined the Palestinian cause. Her clinic, the Post reported, fired her.)

[Iddo Gefen: What ‘Intifada Revolution’ looks like]

The story mentions just two other people whose lives were “upended” because they “criticized Israel.” StopAntisemitism “has flagged people for a variety of statements the organization considers antisemitic,” the Post reported, “including a college instructor who called Israelis ‘pigs’ and a high school basketball coach who wore a shirt with a watermelon, a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, to a game.” The coach is the most sympathetic person in the story, although the Post fails to mention that he wore the shirt to a game in which his team was playing a Jewish school. Those who were—in my opinion, unjustifiably—angry about the shirt seem to feel that the symbol wasn’t a general expression of support for Palestinians, but targeted at a group of Jewish high schoolers. Either way, the coach was suspended, and apologized. The college instructor, who is no longer employed by her school, did not, but “called Israelis ‘pigs’” does not quite capture her comments, which included, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” and, “May they rot in hell.”

The Post story raises important questions: Should these people, or others whose views are unpopular in a particular community or workplace, have been fired from their job? What are the ethics of reposting their social-media comments or footage of their public acts on an account devoted to making private citizens face personal or professional consequences? How much do we want to rely on viral social-media posts to police ugly behaviors and comments? But these questions are much more difficult to answer when the situations that gave rise to them are fundamentally mischaracterized.

News outlets have a duty to both accurately report the news and include the context necessary for readers to understand it. The Post article not only casts the whitewashing of Hamas and the murders it committed as “criticism” of Israel; it also fails to explain Hamas’s aims—which include the complete destruction of Israel by any means, including the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happens to public discourse around the most controversial issues when media outlets don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about?

Campuses across the country are seething over Gaza. On social media, in Congress, and in the media, debates rage over whether these protests are admirable, gatherings of idealistic young people voicing their dissent over a war that has reportedly killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, many of them innocent children and women, or whether the protesters are entitled, terrorism-excusing rule-breakers who should face consequences when they intentionally flout the law.

Much of this conversation has been carried out in bad faith, such as when grandstanding Republicans decided to haul university presidents before Congress for a public dressing-down. And the decision of administrators at several schools—including Columbia University, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin—to ask law enforcement to break up student encampments and demonstrations represented a dramatic, and inflammatory, escalation.

Part of the debate turns on whether the protests are anti-Semitic. And it has been easy to find examples of blatant anti-Semitism, some of it from standard-fare lunatics and much of it from actual pro-Palestinian protesters; some of it on college campuses, and much of it part of other protests held off-campus and comprising many people who are not students. One problem, though, is that campus higher-ups and the broader public can’t agree on what anti-Semitism is. There are obvious examples: Yelling at Jews to “go back to Poland,” for instance. But the waters get murkier when it comes to anti-Zionism: Are chants calling for the destruction of Israel anti-Semitic, or merely anti-Zionist? What about chants cheering on Hamas? Who gets to draw the line: Jewish students who say they feel threatened, observers who are upset and offended, protesters (some of them Jewish), or critics who say feelings aren’t facts and even stringent anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism?

The question of anti-Semitism is an important one, especially because colleges and universities have long made it their business to police on-campus bias and discrimination (and are obligated under federal law to ensure that all of their students can access an education). But it is not the only relevant question. More salient, and less explored even by major media outlets, is this: What do the protesters actually stand for?

According to some news outlets, the protests are best characterized as “anti-war.” And that’s true insofar as the groups leading the protests do oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, and no doubt many of the demonstrators show up because they’ve watched horror after horror unfold, sympathize with a long-oppressed population that is now being killed by the thousands, and want to voice their desire for the violence to cease. But the protests—both on college campuses and those led by broader, noncampus groups—have articulated demands and ideologies. News outlets have a responsibility to report what those are, and are largely failing.

Many of the protest groups agree with that critique of the coverage. National Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram, “Do not cover our protests if you will not cover what we are fighting for.” On-campus demands vary from college to college, but generally include that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel, cut ties with Israeli universities and academics, offer amnesty to all student and faculty protesters who have broken laws or campus rules, and implement total transparency for all university investments and holdings.

[Michael Powell: ‘We want all of it’]

But those demands are not the sum total of the protest groups’ aims. Two of the student groups coordinating the encampments at Columbia, for example, published a guide answering the question “What principles must one align with in order to sign onto our coalition?” and clarifying “the cause we are fighting for.” The core principles include the Thawabit, originally published in 1977 and characterized as nonnegotiable Palestinian “red lines” (albeit ones from which many advocates for peace and statehood who actually live in Palestine have since deviated). Those include a right to Palestinian statehood, making Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, the right of return, and the right to resistance, even armed resistance, or “struggle by all available means.”

These groups have also routinely refused to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7 that led to the Israeli incursion, even while they have found time to condemn far less egregious acts. (An October 12 statement from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voices for Peace lambasted those calling for peace and issued five separation condemnations of Columbia, including two for emails that voiced sympathy for Israelis without sufficient recognition of Palestinian suffering.) Some protest leaders and professors have explicitly said that they will not condemn Hamas, or that requests to do so are a distraction; others have overtly embraced the organization.

Similar ideologies and goals have taken center stage at off-campus protests as well, with banners pledging to secure Palestinian freedom By Any Means Necessary and chants cheering on Hamas and rejecting a two-state solution in favor of the end of Israel (“We want all of ’48”). Protesters should be free to gather and make their demands, of course, but these particular demands are not, by any reasonable definition, “anti-war.” Protesters who endorse these ideas are against Israel’s war in Gaza, but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state. (What else does “by any means necessary” connote if not an embrace of any means necessary, no matter how vicious?) These groups are not calling for all combat to end. Too many support any self-styled “resistance” group that, like Hamas, uses violence against civilians to achieve its ideological and theological aims.

This does not make every protester a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, as some have claimed. Contrary to what National Students for Justice in Palestine itself argues, showing up at a protest does not and should not require pledging allegiance to the maximal demands of its organizers. Nor do those demands, in my view, negate the moral urgency of the protests, which in the aggregate—if not at their organizational core—are about ending a bloody war. And although there are no polls or data on what the many protesters who are not aligned with the major pro-Palestinian groups think, my personal sense is that the majority are horrified by the brutality they see Palestinians enduring and believe this war is a moral atrocity. They protest because they want to see it end—not because they have any sophisticated understanding of the “intifada revolution” that the organizers often champion, or because they are “pro-Hamas,” as so many conservative outlets claim.

If the public is to understand the protests, then journalists need to give a sense of proportion, and at least attempt to cover what average demonstrators think and why they show up. But they also need to do exactly what protest organizers ask, which is to clearly articulate those organizers’ demands and positions. And for people who are horrified by the war but do not support Hamas or like-minded groups and who do not champion the destruction of Israel (or the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Jews that they fear would come with the end of the state), it’s especially important to understand and take seriously what protest leaders are saying.

If you disagree with the organizers—and I imagine a lot of people who oppose this war, including many who are protesting, do—then the decision becomes whether to participate anyway because the stakes are so high, sit it out because the disagreements run so deep, attempt to wrest control and put forward goals that are much more popular with the American public, or attempt to make the existing movement a big-enough tent to allow in “Zionists” who oppose violence of all kinds and support an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.

None of that is possible when conservative news outlets tar all of the protesters as pro-Hamas, while more liberal ones suggest they are merely anti-war.

This same failure has emerged in the coverage of the counterprotests. Just outside the Columbia gates, well-known Trump-affiliated Christian nationalists were among the organizers of a pro-Israel rally—if you can call a group whose apocalyptic religious aims require the return of Jews to Israel so that they might all convert or die when Christ returns “pro-Israel.” And there has been remarkably little reporting on the ideologies, affiliations, and goals of the counterprotesters, despite reports that they have also been making threats and shouting bigoted comments, including “go back to Gaza.” At UCLA, counterprotesters are widely reported to have fomented serious violence against the pro-Palestinian activists in an encampment and to have brutalized student journalists. Are these demonstrators, who seem to have grown more aggressive in recent days, really merely “pro-Israel”? Or are their more expansive ideologies, and perhaps other connections, at play?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

Although many observers and commentators invoke the right to protest or the right to free speech, the student protesters seem disinclined to make free-speech or assembly claims to justify their actions, perhaps realizing that many of the tactics they are using are outside the First Amendment’s protections. And even as student protesters stand accused of making their fellow students feel unsafe with their anti-Zionism and with their allegedly anti-Semitic behaviors, those same protesters do not shy away from claims that their safety is being threatened by people whose ideas they oppose, or from demands that those people be removed from campus. To try to parse the protests using generally applicable standards of free speech or content-neutral campus rules is to misunderstand what many of the protesters are asserting, which is less about any particular norm and more about moral clarity. Israel, many protesters argue, is conducting a genocide, and they need to stand in opposition. It could not be clearer.

The protesters’ simple argument is that their cause is righteous and should therefore be supported, and that their schools should enable their protests. These schools are communities, as administrators continuously remind them. Non-righteous causes and individuals, the protesters believe, should not be allowed. A community’s norms are set not only by the law, but by what that community deems acceptable, moral, and desirable. But, from the other perspective, college campuses that receive federal dollars are required to ensure that all students can access an education safely and without discrimination—an obligation that some Jewish students and political leaders say is being compromised by anti-Israel protesters.

And so the protests also raise a question of content, not just one of content-neutral norms. Or at least, this has been the position of the protesters, who do not believe that content-neutral time-place-manner restrictions on protest should apply to them. If these protests were about a less popular campus cause—say, in opposition to Donald Trump’s criminal trials, or to petition their schools to end affirmative action, or to demand that their school do more to support Israel’s war in Gaza—it is hard to imagine such a full-throated demand that students be permitted to violate generally applicable protest rules. But the rules seem to be considered broadly irrelevant here, in light of the stark moral claims.

In the protesters’ defense, they do have a stark moral claim in their generalized opposition to a grotesque ongoing war. And their actions echo those of Vietnam War protesters, who also took up a righteous cause, shook the nation, used unpopular and disruptive tactics, and were widely criticized, before being ultimately vindicated in their belief that the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam was tragic, immoral, and unnecessary. One has to wonder if that movement, and the leftist movements that developed in its aftermath, would have been more successful in achieving a variety of goals had it not devolved into the maximalism of chanting “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, victory to the Vietcong,” engaging in bombings, and offering support for the murderous Khmer Rouge.

Of course, one does not have to wonder if college administrators feel proud of their decision to call in law enforcement. In the Vietnam era, when they did so, some students were killed, many were arrested, and schools, including Columbia, have for decades considered their response a badge of shame.

Today, a clear line of argument has emerged from many progressive commentators: First, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful and not anti-Semitic. Second, it undermines and mischaracterizes a vital movement to focus on a few bad actors who spout anti-Semitic vitriol, or to emphasize a few chants that glorify Hamas or call for the destruction of Israel. Third, the obsessive coverage of these protests is coming at the expense of the much more important story, which is the war itself. And in many respects, this is a sensible position. A war costing tens of thousands of lives, conducted by a key U.S. ally following a horrific terrorist attack, is a much more important story than whatever college students are doing in the United States. The violent crackdowns on these protests strike many, myself included, as far more troubling than the protests themselves. And it isn’t fair to conflate what a handful of protesters do or say with a much broader movement.

But again, many news outlets, journalists, and commentators are sidestepping the content of the protests and the demands of the protesters, both on and off college campuses. The content and demands shouldn’t have any bearing on whether the police are called in (or on whether the National Guard should be called in—an appalling and deeply illiberal and authoritarian suggestion). But progressives who oppose violence on all sides should have a clear sense of what those who claim to speak for this movement are advocating, so they can decide where to participate and where to push back—protest movements are dynamic things, and can be reshaped by those invested in their outcome. And the public should understand protesters’ demands and aims, as well as those of the counterprotesters. The only way that happens is if media outlets forgo euphemism and are clear on what individuals and leaders actually say. And on that much, at least, even the protest organizers seem to agree.