To be clear, the quote implied the protestors weren’t being violent at all, right — at least in their view. Are we on the same page about that?

Edit: I guess I’m not understanding your point. To me the protester’s narrative is “This is a nonviolent protest of a faculty’s exclusionary viewpoint,” which doesn’t seem that abnormal to me. What do you think I’m not seeing?

Well... setting off flares isn't the same as punching or shooting people. It's not directly violent. But it is kind of threatening, because they can point those flares at you, and it may hit you, and that's not going to feel very good (at best). So there's kind of a threat of violence, but not actual violence.

And, yes, I think that in their own mind the protesters were either completely innocent of violence, or else completely justified in the implicit threat of violence because the mere presence of the opponent was so threatening.

It's kind of like a guy with a gun on his hip, complaining that a gun control advocate is threatening him by wanting to take away his gun.

Yeah, the flares do add a level of spectacle. Do you see the 2nd amendment protests then as similarly abnormal?

See, to me, any protest involves a mob, and I would be concerned for safety of the target regardless of whether people had guns or flares or fists or rocks, you know?

I see a mob with fists as a level of threat, rocks as a higher level, and guns as an even higher level.

My previous post had a flaw, though. I was thinking of fireworks that shoot something that burns and explodes, which flares are not. Flares are a lot less dangerous than that, and are not much of a threat. (I guess you could throw it or shove it in someone's face.) So my analogy with 2nd-amendment-vs-gun-control kind of breaks down. I'm leaving the previous post unedited for history, but it was wrong.

So at that point... you've got a group that is protesting, and they claim they aren't marching, so they aren't really threatening anyone. But at that point, they're still present. That is, by their own logic, where someone else's presence threatens them, well, they're present, so they are a threat too, right?

So, even though my previous post was wrong, the protesters' logic still doesn't make any sense.

Right. The result of the protest is an unsafe environment for the professor. My point is just that any protest I can think of, whether it’s outside a government building, a business, or on a college campus, involves being present, so it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. That’s not to say I condone an unsafe work environment, to be clear.