Majority of college students support Israel/Gaza campus protests, 1 in 10 actually participate in them

The Israeli-Palestinian protests that have rocked college campuses over the past month are supported by a majority of students at those schools, according to multiple surveys released this week.

So what are students saying about the protests?

Three surveys of college students by Intelligent.com, Generation Lab/Axios, and Newsweek/College Pulse find that roughly 3 in 5 students are on campuses where pro-Palestinan protests are occurring, roughly 1 in 10 students are participating in these protests, and a significant portion of students not participating in the protests are supportive of them. According to the Intelligent.com survey, support among students for the protests is as high as 65%. 

A notable portion of students — roughly a quarter to a third in most cases — also support illiberal protest tactics, such as blocking students from attending class or occupying campus buildings. 

Many students support pro-Palestinian protests and use of illiberal protest tactics 

The Intelligent.com survey found that about 2 in 3 students are supportive of the pro-Palestinian protests on campus, with only 1 in 10 students opposing them. Both the Intelligent.com survey and the Generation Lab/Axios survey asked students more specifically whether they support or oppose the encampments currently happening on college campuses, and almost half of students said they support them — 46% in the Intelligent.com survey and 45% in the Generation Lab/Axios sample. 

(Note: The Intelligent.com summary of the survey’s results notes that 75% of students who are supportive of the protests also support the use of encampments. FIRE recalculated the percentage of students who are supportive of the encampments for the entire sample, which is how we got 46%.) 

Shouting down a speaker on campus chills speech — and, contrary to what some people may believe, is not protected under the First Amendment.

The Intelligent.com survey also asked students if they support the use of illiberal protest tactics and whether they find it acceptable to refuse an order to disperse an encampment, protest, or effort to occupy campus buildings. About a quarter of students indicated they support the use of all of the illiberal protest tactics about which they were asked. This includes blocking students from attending class or pro-Palestinian protesters engaging in violence. Additionally, support for illiberal protest tactics is higher among students surveyed by Intelligent.com who support the protests.

(Note: The Intelligent.com summary of the survey’s results reports the percentage of students who are supportive of the protests who also support the use of the illiberal protest tactics. FIRE recalculated the percentage of students who are supportive of illiberal protest tactics for the entire sample.) 

The Generation Lab/Axios poll also asked students what kinds of illiberal protest tactics are acceptable for students to use as part of their protest. Roughly 2 in 5 students (42%) said that it is acceptable for students to refuse a university order to disperse an encampment or protest; one-third said it is acceptable for students to occupy buildings; and 1 in 10 said it is acceptable to block students who support Israel from entering certain spaces on campus.

FIRE also asks students whether they consider illiberal protest tactics acceptable in our annual College Free Speech Rankings survey. Of note, the percentage of students who said that they support pro-Palestinian protesters engaging in violent actions in the Intelligent.com survey (24%) is similar to the percentage of students who said that college students using violence to stop a campus speech is at least rarely acceptable in last year’s survey (27%). This indicates that whether students are asked about pro-Palestinian protesters or generic students stopping a campus speech by an unspecified speaker, about a quarter of them consider the use of violence acceptbale.

We recently found that schools where students are more accepting of the use of illiberal protest tactics are also more likely to have had arrests occur on campus over the past few weeks. This is also the case for campuses that have experienced more deplatforming attempts from 2020-present. 

Most students think schools should hold protesters accountable if they break the law 

Although a majority of students support the protests, an even larger majority think that protesters should be held accountable if they break the law. 

According to the Generation Lab/Axios poll, 8 in 10 students say that protesters who destroyed property or vandalized or illegally occupied buildings should be held responsible for their actions. 

The Newsweek/College Pulse poll found that almost 3 in 5 students (58%) think that their school has handled protesters appropriately, while about a third (30%) — roughly the same percentage of students that say occupying buildings is acceptable — believe their school handled protesters too harshly. 

Vandalism, destruction of property, occupying a building, and using physical violence are not forms of protected speech; they are against the law. 

These findings are consistent with decades of social psychological research demonstrating weak links between peoples’ attitudes and their actual behaviors. For instance, when Americans are asked abstractly whether they support civil liberties almost everyone indicates that they do, but many of them also support censorship of specific kinds of expression they dislike. 

Because of this weak link between attitudes and behaviors, we should be careful not to equate the number of students that support an illiberal protest tactic with the number of students who would actually engage in them. In other words, the number of students who are blocking students from attending class, occupying campus buildings, or engaging in violence is smaller than the number of students participating in the encampments or who simply support the protests. 

At the same time, a notable portion of students support or accept other students' illiberal protest tactics. Even though these students themselves are not occupying buildings, they are, to a certain extent, helping create an environment that emboldens the ones who are. 

Building occupations

These findings are deeply concerning, and they are not merely hypothetical. Over the past few weeks, students have occupied libraries and other campus buildings on multiple U.S. campuses. 

Students at Cal Poly Humboldt occupied an academic and administrative building for a week, forcing the campus to close. They were removed by police and arrested on April 30. The same day, Columbia University students occupied Hamilton Hall, then were removed that evening by police officers in riot gear. The day before, students at Portland State University occupied the campus library for several days. The protesters left the library’s books alone, but vandalized the walls, furniture, doors, and windows. And last week, students at the Rhode Island School of Design occupied an administrative and academic building for several days.

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Then, over the weekend, students at New York University temporarily occupied the lobby of the campus library, the third time student protesters occupied a campus building since April 21. 

On the other side of the country, dozens of University of California, Berkeley, students disrupted the commencement ceremony multiple times, including by interrupting a speech by the student body president. About 500 students then took over a section of empty seats in the stadium and continued to chant over the commencement speakers. 

These illiberal behaviors differ from walking out of commencement in protest of one of the commencement speakers, like students did at Duke University during Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks, or from protesting outside the commencement venue peacefully, as many students across the country did. 

Shouting down a speaker on campus chills speech — and, contrary to what some people may believe, is not protected under the First Amendment. Preventing students from attending class is disruptive to the functioning of the college or university. Vandalism, destruction of property, occupying a building, and using physical violence are not forms of protected speech; they are against the law. Campus administrators cannot let students who engage in these kinds of behaviors off the hook. These actions require consequences, otherwise, the state of free speech on campus will only get worse.