Earlier this month, the University of Hawaiʻi’s recent changes to its rules for protests on campus went into effect.

In a letter to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, UH president Wendy Hensel — a former lawyer and law professor — clarified that these are “viewpoint-neutral” revisions to existing policies about the time, place and manner of protests and other “expressive activities.” They are attempts to eliminate ambiguity that she cites as “one of the greatest threats to free speech because it can allow decisions to be influenced, or appear to be influenced, by viewpoint.”

I completely understand where these policies are coming from. It is an impossible yet nevertheless necessary task to at once allow for civil disobedience – the kind protected by the constitution and central to the ethos and establishment of American nationhood – while also ensuring safety and a functioning university for those who are not involved with any protests. 

As the head of a public institution it’s Hensel’s duty to take all sides into account, and it appears she made a genuine effort to do so the right way: over a period of eight months, and in collaboration with students, faculty, administrators, safety personnel and civil liberties advocates. It’s a laudable effort, even if it is bound to buckle under the weight of its inherent contradictions. 

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This is not a critique of Hensel or the university, who have the unenviable task of trying to regulate resistance. I’d rather use this as an opportunity to start a much larger and much-needed discussion about protests, especially in a time of genocide, war and rapidly normalizing state violence — the three main reasons why students nationwide (and people in general) have been protesting in the first place. 

What is the purpose of protesting? Is there such a thing as a protest that follows the rules? How do you have obedient civil disobedience? Has there ever been a successful social movement that was polite to the authorities it was attempting to influence? 

The only examples I can think of, like the Candlelight Protests in South Korea that led to the removal and imprisonment of president Park Geun-hye, are from other countries. Conversely, the most successful and important American social movements – be it Women’s Suffrage, the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, or the Gay Rights Movement – have all been actively disruptive. 

To be sure, disruptive does not mean violent, and the disruption should be specific and targeted in order to be effective. But protests are by nature meant to break rules. They can’t work when they are treated like intramural sports, with a play area, boundaries and a bedtime. 

These kinds of time, place and manner parameters, even when produced by good faith concerns about public safety and access, ultimately render protests – and thus their causes – easily dismissed and ignored. 

That’s exactly what happened when students walked out of schools earlier this year to protest ICE officers gunning down citizens. It was a disruption meant to prompt discussion and hopefully action regarding how the federal government wields violence, but instead it became a cacophony of clutched pearls and dismissive scoffs. 

That’s the name of the game; not every protest will be successful or have immediate impact, and it takes sustained effort to create real change. That doesn’t diminish the legitimacy of the action, or the cause behind it. It is hard enough to translate individual protests into tangible change, but asking protests to become more sequestered and submissive will only further defang them. 

Scoffers will scoff. They did the same to the people who protested the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. By the time U.S. troops withdrew 20 years later – after hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars lost in the desert and numerous civil liberties dissolved at home – both America and Afghanistan were significantly worse off than they were before the war. In hindsight, no one would deny that the protestors were right. Those who oppose reckless war and senseless violence always are. 

Likewise, the people protesting the idiotic war in Iran, the psychopathic violence of ICE, and our nation’s role in the relentless butchering of Palestinians are also right. The aim of these protests is to avoid waiting 20 years to realize it this time around, which will require some disruptive action and rule-breaking.

It is telling that young people have been criticized for being all flash and no fire, but when they take substantive action, they’re still criticized for not doing it the way the authorities prefer. It almost seems like the real goal is to get them to stop protesting entirely.

Clearly, protesting alone is not enough, and there is valid discussion to be had about its uses and limits, but it is a politically legitimate expression, even when – especially when – it breaks rules and upsets the status quo. It is one of the only immediate actions people can take to register their voices. 

The college students protesting see the world they’re set to inherit, the life that will be available to them, and justifiably feel angry. Their anger is not youthful naivete, it is the byproduct of moral clarity, the sane response to what is plainly happening in this country. We are living through a heyday of flagrant corruption and petty cruelty. That is worth fighting against.

The real division reflected by this discourse isn’t young vs. old or right vs. left. It’s people who believe society can change vs. those who think it’s useless to try and change it. Those who decry the fact that students are registering their outrage, those who tell them to keep a distance and keep it down – they are firmly in the latter camp. And they are wrong.