The students and others involved in pro-Palestinian protests at Portland State University should have done something else before they got together.

They should have studied.

Something that ought not be a foreign concept for college students.

But rather than reading and learning, protesters at PSU, Oregon’s largest public university, prevented everyone else from having access to the tens of thousands of volumes inside the school’s Millar Library.

And even though the protesters — most of whom, according to police, were not PSU students but apparently agitators of the sort in which Portland never seems to be deficient — were removed from the library by police on May 2, the library remains closed.

That’s because protesters vandalized the library so extensively that repairing the damage could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and keep the library closed for another month or so, according to a PSU official.

It’s a pity that the protesters, who painted slogans on public property and damaged windows, doors, offices, computers and other items, didn’t instead read accounts of Martin Luther King Jr. and the thousands of other brave Americans whose actions in the 1950s and 1960s yielded tangible results such as the federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

This isn’t to imply that King condemned all protests that weren’t completely peaceful. He famously described riots as “the language of the unheard.”

But the reverend was devoted to nonviolent protests. He didn’t take over and vandalize public libraries to make his righteous statements. He didn’t need to.

Nor did King steal from the public. PSU officials said valuable materials, including historical documents, are missing from the library.

The right for citizens to publicly air their grievances was so important to America’s founders that they enshrined it in the Constitution.

Protesters who cloak themselves in that protection sometimes try to justify actions such as the occupation of the PSU library by comparing the damage to inanimate objects, such as buildings and books, to the deaths happening daily in the Middle East.

This is lazy thinking.

As King and those who followed his lead proved so often and so eloquently, protesters no more need to vandalize property than they need to hurt people to express their complaints.

The point here is not whether the protests at PSU and on many other campuses, including the University of Oregon, will contribute to any of the changes the protesters are calling for. That question can’t be answered now. Protesters who double as vandals don’t deserve to be rewarded for their criminal antics, however.

What we do know is that the protesters at PSU have deprived the public of the use of a building that is supposed to be open to everyone.

That the building is a library, where we celebrate one of the greatest of equal rights — the right to learn — adds an unpleasant tinge of irony to a troubling episode.