Many of these are professional protesters that are paid to cause trouble.
I think that $ is behind a lot of this
I might be wrong about it (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I think we are witnessing the jump-the-shark moment for traditional colleges in general and the elites in particular. The last time there was this kind of mayhem, during the Vietnam War, there was a genuine split in the country between the pro- and anti-war groups, but this time practically no one outside the radical left and the Muslicrats supports Hamas—it’s as if the ethnic Japanese were to have taken over universities in early 1942 because of the Doolittle raid.
What Hamas did on 10/7 is the modern equivalent of the Rape of Nanking and Pearl Harbor rolled into one, and we can argue about how much money to send to Israel or how many troops we want over there, but only the Nazi-antisemites among us say they can’t defend themselves by any means necessary from what Hamas wants to do to them. The more the colleges look like they support the protestors or aren’t willing to despise them, the less Americans are going to want to support the colleges or their graduates.
Many others have no clue why they are there. It’s just a big social event for them. They get caught up in the moment. Few actually understand what they are involved in. I saw the same with my son’s college when blm crap was spreading.
They would all do it for free.