In one newspaper photograph of the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Minnesota this week, I counted 20 or 21 tents, 18 or 19 of them the same color, a variation of yellow. Earlier, I had seen the same phenomenon at Columbia University in New York, all a variation of blue.

With many more to follow, three kids of the kids I used to have already left home to pursue higher learning. One will finish this year (he claims), one is just starting and one is at the halfway mark. So far, so good. None of them have changed their hair to mimic a snow cone drizzled in rainbow colors and none of them have acquired an emotional support animal of any kind.

And none of them took a tent to school. A steamer trunk full of cosmetics perhaps, maybe a music collection to rival a radio station vault, or golf clubs.

Mom might have stood in the alley weeping, but she didn’t say, “Honey, don’t forget your tent.”

When I think back, we didn’t bring a tent to college. If you took classes in the middle of Yosemite or the untamed wilds of Montana, bringing a tent to school probably wouldn’t be unusual at all. But in Manhattan or Minneapolis or Los Angeles or Madison?

Where are they getting the tents?

It has been dribbling out on social media platforms, which cannot be trusted for truth, that the tents have been provided by outside agencies. Reported by conventional news-gathering institutions is the curious fact that many of the protesters are professionals, paid agitators who have nothing to do with the school and who would presumably protest new parking lot regulations or the absence of gluten-free muffins on the dining hall menu for the right price. Maybe they have a 1959 Pontiac ambulance/hearse they use to race to the scene of stricken universities.

Speaking of which, a Columbia student reported to be Johannah King-Slutzky has gone viral, as they say, for a video in which she told members of the New York media that the protesters “were at risk of dying or becoming severely ill” if the authorities did not deliver food and water to them.

At that point, the “protesters” had been out on the comfortably green commons in a probably provided-for tent not long enough for their stomachs to growl.

The people in Gaza, including Israeli hostages, would dearly love some food and water. So would deprived children in the Horn of Africa, the Uyghurs in China, the parents down the street who use the food shelves. And who do they have speaking for them? Some student at Columbia who probably has an appointment this week for a $300 haircut.

If this isn’t the dumbest generation of college students this nation has ever seen, it certainly is the most entitled. Students still trying to attend classes at any school with encampments (where did you get that nice tent?) should sue the institutions for their money back. Make these cradles of failure dip into their endowments for a change and reward the kid trying get a legitimate degree and who intends to engage in useful citizenship.

Better yet, tap the endowment and buy airplane tickets out of here for the kids who hate this country and toss around words like colonialism and imperialism, which they know nothing about and hadn’t even heard until they took their first “class” in diversity, equity and inclusion.

They hate America until they realize that means the end of $300 haircuts, support hamsters and that plan they got from Mom and Dad for unlimited cellphone time. They’re phonies of the worst kind. And they didn’t go off to school with tents.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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