I’ve thought and written about social justice, and I was troubled by the recent protests at Case Western Reserve University. Consider this:

​Someone shouts something sometimes heard as threatening and knows that it could affect people that way. Yet what’s shouted is not logically needed. Other expressions make the point. But the person shouting says that they are peace-loving.

​They knew how others might hear them, and the expression they used wasn’t necessary. But they used it anyway.

​”From the river to the sea,” “intifada” and “you can’t hide” were not logically needed to make the point of the protests that recently occurred at CWRU’s encampment. “Confederation!” “Two-state solution!” “Human rights for all!” and “For justice! For peace!” could have been used instead. Worse, the expressions used had a history of violence (the first even appeared in right-wing Israeli propaganda for further ethnic cleansing of Palestine).

​Protesters knew these things roughly. But they insisted, claiming to be peaceful. Peace, however, is work demanding consistent respect.

​Consistency was abandoned during the weeks of the protests and their aftermath. There were personal insults on the signage around the encampment, then brought to Adelbert Hall. There were outrageous claims made from sloppy moral thinking, for instance, that the president of the school is a murderer. Mainly, the protesters failed to genuinely consider those who did not fully accept the protest’s ideology and style.

​The tone at the borders of the protest meeting outsiders was not conducive to dialogue. Initially, I was troubled by the administration and ready to blame them. Why weren’t they out there dialoguing? But I discovered that the administration had tried to dialogue with the protesters. It was the protesters who did not dialogue with the administration—nor, in my experience, with anyone criticizing their tactics.

​The protesters gave their word to the administration and then broke it, repeatedly. They equated others listening to them with others agreeing with them. But there is room for reasonable disagreement around the issues that were protested. The protesters thus adopted a philosophy amounting to arbitrariness: They broke promises expediently to suit their interests and made command and obedience models for interpersonal communication!

​There was rampant inaccuracy on protest social media. Students for Justice in Palestine and its network of cross-posting organizations, even the National Lawyers Guild, telegraphed self-serving untruths. For example, no one accepted the spray painting of protesters except the protesters who came prepared to be painted in a photo op. The worker-contractors caught in the middle tried to work around the students. The administration didn’t tolerate what happened and didn’t authorize it. But social media posts frequently listed the spray painting as an act of the university.

​Similarly convenient sloppiness appeared in saying that the conduct process was “punishment” when no consequences had yet been determined or “retaliation” when civil disobedience accepts that there are legalities to disruptive action. Even worse, before the encampment disbanded, student protesters and faculty sympathetic to their cause argued that no one protesting should be held responsible for their protest actions, even in failing to do final exams or projects. These folks argued that the protesters were engaged in righteous action and should be expected to disrupt operations on campus, even to break the law.

​But what is civil disobedience if you do not challenge, by enduring, the social logic of the norms you break? The fundamental tactic of the protest was self-contradictory.

​The self-contradiction recurred when the protesters gave themselves their own graduation rather than acknowledge the expedited conduct policy of the university and responsibly accept the meaning of what they had intentionally done. How ironic this was: In graduating themselves, the protesters overruled the faculty’s governance and acted as though a degree is something they can earn without due process. They undermined the meaning of peace, protest and their education.

Society is made of relations. It is undermined by misrelations. When we blur relations such as truthful expression, consideration of the viewpoints of others and even what is pragmatic for the common good, we open up misrelation. This editorial is about the fallacious, inconsiderate and unpragmatic protest that occurred at the end of the spring semester at CWRU. Although I support the protests at the U.S. Capitol against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit in July and have been critical of CWRU’s administration around related issues in the past years, I came to see that the spring protest was part of the problem, not part of the solution.