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How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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politics
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With the peaceful protests I've been to or that have happened at my university, most of the time they haven't tried to stop anything aside from cops being stationed waiting for it to deescalate, then the protest eventually fizzles out and people forget it happened. There are a couple exceptions to these though:
One protest happened at the same time as a bunch of other protests on different campuses, and a large number of troopers and other law enforcement with weapons shut it down and arrested dozens of people for refusing to leave an area. There was a lot of shady (and illegal) actions happening between the university admin and Texas government, where even Zionist Reddit shitlibs thought it was extreme. There was an investigation going on led by a student-run newspaper since then, not sure if it's still happening. As far as why they did this, my guess is: (1) fear of property damage based on actions in other protests and (2) governor Abbott wanting to put on a political show by exercising his power, but I highly doubt it was because it posed a real threat to their power.
The official student newspaper reporting on pro-Palestine topics painting the university in a negative light, eventually leading the university to fire the entire newspaper. Probably due to a fear of reputational damage so they wanted to impose additional obstacles (which of course backfired).
Overall these didn't result in any actual policy changes so there wasn't much of an outcome. It did cause some reputational damage, where even FIRE thought our admin was too fascist and ranked us almost last. It's probably impacting their enrollment and hiring faculty at least a little bit (but there are a lot of other factors negatively impacting this as well). Also resulted in more financial burdens for the protesters involving bail fees and needing to fund their new independent newspaper in different ways.
There was another (non-peaceful) protest I heard of in the area involving an ICE agent being hospitalized and protestors facing terrorism charges. This also didn't result in any policy changes, but did have some real-world harm to fascists and threat to their security, but also larger financial burdens and a lot more difficult to build popular support over.