The term “right” is probably overused.  It is certainly overused and abused when talking about having the right to someone else’s labor or property.  You can only have the right to a job or the right to have healthcare by forcing someone else to provide it.

Even when talking about liberty, the term “right” is still not usually the best word to use.  Your rights are only as good as what other people recognize, even if others are wrong.  You can say you have the right to bear arms or the right to free speech, but it doesn’t do much good if others don’t recognize those rights.

Just imagine someone in North Korea or Afghanistan yelling out that they have a right to keep their own property no matter what any government may say.  Maybe they should have a right, but that doesn’t make it so.  If the government and the rest of society don’t recognize that right, then it doesn’t mean much.  It is declaring what should be and not what is.

With that said, it isn’t so much a question of “Do students have the right to protest?” as it is a question of “Should students have the right to protest?”

Private Property Rights

In a free society, property rights would be respected.  There is some semblance of property rights in every country.  Even in North Korea, I assume you can own a toothbrush and not have to share it.

Unfortunately, in every country on the planet, there are also violations of property rights.  This doesn’t just mean being able to own a house.  It also means being able to retain the earnings from your labor.

In the U.S., most colleges and universities are a combination of private and public.  Most of them accept government funding in some way.  The government is also involved in its massive subsidization of student loans.

This makes it easy for the government (federal and state) to have a say about the policies on college campuses.  After all, they are “helped” by the government.  For any libertarian who supports school vouchers, consider this scenario applied to K through 12.

There is actually no correct libertarian answer on whether students should have the right to protest on campus.  It should be up to the owners and administrators of the school to determine the policies and whether protests are allowed.  Unfortunately, that “ownership” goes out the window when the government is involved.

Imagine a privately owned business where a group of employees decide to protest something.  They set up tents on business property and are chanting slogans as other employees go to their job.  Does anyone really think this would be tolerated for long?  In most cases, the employees would probably be told to go back to work or else be fired.  Some of them might just be fired without any chance to go back to their job.

I will acknowledge that there are faults in this analogy.  A college or university isn’t really producing goods and services the way most other businesses do.  They are providing a service to the students in exchange for money.  The students may be hurting themselves by protesting, especially if they aren’t going to class.  As long as they are not disrupting others from going to class, perhaps there is little harm in it.

Hypocrisy

Given that we do live in a statist world where the government funds higher education, it is interesting to look at current protests and how they are being handled.

Most of the protests are against the Israeli state.  They are protesting generally what they see as a genocide in Gaza.  Many of the protests have specific demands for their school, such as not investing in certain weapons manufacturers.  Still, the general sentiment is that they are against the mass bombing, killing, and displacement of the people in Gaza.  And they recognize that the U.S. government is largely funding this.

Despite what the media portrays, most of these protests have been peaceful.  They are not destroying school property or prohibiting others from going to class.  They are generally not using violence.  Most of the violence that has occurred has been after the police get there to break up the protests.

And to be clear, these colleges probably wouldn’t have attempted to break up the protests if it hadn’t been for pressure from the government.

It is hard not to contrast these protests with previous protests.  Think about the BLM protests and riots of 2020.  Cities across America were burning.  There was widespread looting of private businesses.  There was a lot of violence.

Yet, politicians and their establishment media talked about the right to protest while downplaying the rioting and massive property destruction.  In many cases, the police were standing down either because they were scared or they were told to.  It is a lot easier for police to take on a bunch of hippie liberal college students who don’t have any weapons and aren’t really looking for a physical fight.

In other words, it is ok to protest and cause major chaos and destruction as long as it fits the narrative of the establishment.  If you question the sacred state of Israel in its mass killing of civilians, then you must be silenced.  Sure, they will say you have a right to peacefully protest, but the government purposely makes it non-peaceful by sending in the police to cause conflict.

Whenever you have a lot of people in a movement, there are always going to be a few bad apples.  I’m sure there have been a few people who have damaged property and maybe even used a little bit of physical violence or unnecessarily getting in people’s faces.  I’m just saying that most of the people protesting really are peacefully protesting if you think they should have a right to protest on a school campus.  Yet, they are being handled more as rioters.

In 2020, there were peaceful protesters, but rioters were almost everywhere that there were massive protests.  Yet, the rioters were handled more like peaceful protesters as property was destroyed.

Again, it is impossible to not think that this is just hypocrisy.  The situations were handled differently based on the narrative of the protest and what was being protested.

Conclusion

In a libertarian society, the government would have no involvement in higher education or any education.  The policies of the schools would determine whether students had a right to protest on campus.

Given our non-libertarian world, we can recognize that these are legitimate protests and mostly peaceful.  The powers-that-be seem to be handling these protests in a different way from some other protests in the past.

I have no doubt there are some major leftwing lunatics within these protests.  Some of them say stupid things such as demanding food and water for themselves.  It still doesn’t make their main message of stopping the slaughter in Gaza wrong.

Most of the protesters are not protesting Jews, despite what some say or portray.  They are protesting the Israeli state and the U.S. funding of the Israeli state.  This is a big distinction.

It is also curious why some more establishment sources are saying that some of these people are paid protesters from the outside.  It is interesting that they fail to point this out with so many other situations.

Even if George Soros is helping to fund some of these protests, it doesn’t automatically make the message wrong.  Soros has his own agenda of stirring up chaos, but it doesn’t mean that the main message of the protests is wrong.

Libertarians should always encourage a separation of school and state.  But the fact that government is involved in “education” doesn’t change the message of the protests.  Libertarians should support protesting the killing of innocent people as long as the protest is peaceful and doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.