In addition to serving as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, I have been a professor for 25 years in UCLA’s Economics Department, where I have taught more than 7,000 undergraduate students and 500 graduate students. And as I walked past the pro-Palestinian student encampment early last week at UCLA, I couldn’t imagine any UCLA students whom I have interacted with over these past 25 years taking over university property, preventing fellow students from walking across campus, disrupting the normal functioning of the university, or having so much hatred as to spray-paint “F*** Jews” on the makeshift barricades that framed the perimeter of the camp. Or to think that that they could dictate University of California policy regarding how the UC makes investments or restricting the commercial organizations that the UC does business with.

And I can’t imagine any of the students I have known to vandalize Royce Hall, UCLA’s most iconic building, after the encampment was forcibly disbanded last week, or to trash the campus’s central quadrangle with refuse ranging from broken tents and pizza boxes to human feces. These acts are not just criminal—they are selfish, immature, and indecent.

There were roughly 500 protesters, perhaps a few more, at the encampment when it was forcibly disbanded by California Highway Patrol officers early Thursday morning of last week. About 300 left peacefully, and around 200 were taken into custody. To put this in perspective, UCLA is home to 46,000 students and 31,000 individuals who work on campus, including nearly 8,000 faculty. Five hundred protesters out of a population of 77,000 represents about 0.6 percent of the UCLA community, assuming that all who were there were part of UCLA. Some reports indicate that many protesters were from outside of UCLA, which would reduce that percentage even lower.

I had the opportunity to speak with one protester last week. He spoke against Zionism and the need for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, and he equated Israel with White supremacism, racism, and colonialism. But his opinions were not particularly well-informed. I asked what Zionism meant and he didn’t have a clear answer, other than saying it represents what Israel is today. He didn’t know that two million Arabs live in Israel, representing 20 percent of the Israeli population, and enjoy the same rights as Israeli Jews. I asked him........

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