Rioters. Let’s call them exactly what they are.

What’s happened – and still happening – at institutions like Columbia, USC, UCLA and elsewhere might have charitably been called a free speech exercise at some point. People have a right to protest, even if most rational people vehemently disagree with them.

But protest stops being protest, and stops being about free speech, when angry mobs use their sudden leverage to shut down all other points of view.

Students can’t study. Teachers can’t teach. Speakers can’t speak. Leaders– well, leadership’s pretty much absent right now anyway (just take a look at all the university presidents who’ve dragged their feet on calling in the police in the faces of their campuses being shut down). Once a protest is used to take a voice away from others, it crosses a line and becomes unacceptable.

If the protests could be continued without disrupting the rights of others, it would be wrong to suspend the students. But in this case, it’s not simply justified but required.

My connection to this debate is somewhat closer than most. My previous social network was deplatformed, and I was run out of town, after we were accused of enabling the Jan. 6 riots. (Which isn’t true - we warned law enforcement something bad was coming and pointed them to Facebook groups where it was mostly organized.)

The behavior on Jan. 6 was wrong then and the behavior on college campuses is wrong now. Did the “QAnon Shaman” draft a new constitution from the occupied halls of Congress? No. Are the agitators who seized our universities somehow going to bring peace to the Middle East? Also no. They are hurting their own causes.

Just as Jan. 6 was a stain on the reputation of the United States, these campus rioters are demonstrating that our universities are losing touch with principles of higher learning - the most important being free speech, debate and discourse. We cannot lose our principles and we cannot sacrifice our values in order to force our will on others. Universities around the country should be making that incredibly clear to students.

The legal and ideological boundaries of protest as free speech end when you start wishing death on your opponents, when you use physical force to seize space, when you make unreasonable demands, when you shout down others and when you refuse to engage in discourse or debate.

My new social platform, Hedgehog, was built specifically to foster that discourse. We need an outlet to talk to each other. Social media today is a place of anger where we shout past each other. We can’t have a reasonable conversation about urgent issues without invective and, now, violence as well.

We need to come back to a place where we can disagree, where we can discuss things rationally, where we can negotiate compromises - and where we can understand that sometimes, people just simply don’t get what they want, but at least they’re heard.

Let the students learn, let the teachers teach. Talk, debate, discuss. Otherwise, all these young ideologues risk the same unproductive fate – over and over again.

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John Matze is former CEO of Parler and currently CEO of Hedgehog, a newly launched social media and news aggregating platform.

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