Protesting is a pastime for the wealthiest, most privileged students

Anti-Israel protests are a rich kids’ pastime — and you don’t have to take it from us: The impeccably liberal Washington Monthly has the stats to prove it.

The magazine found that the campuses where students most rely on Pell Grants (funding reserved for lower-income Americans) were least likely to have seen post-Oct. 7 anti-Israel protests and encampments.

That is: “In the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.”

Notably: There were zero encampments at 78 historically black colleges and universities across America, and only nine had protests, “a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.”

With a handful of exceptions like City College (where it’s easy for local nonstudent radicals to join in), the only campuses to see encampments are those where tuition runs 60 grand or higher — that is, the most elite universities.

It doesn’t take much mulling to figure out why: Working-class kids go to college to have a shot at the American dream of upward mobility; they’re far less likely to waste time (and risk trouble with the cops or the administration) over a virtue-signaling vanity project.

Plus, they know their parents won’t put up with them taking days off from class to sit on a lawn and scream about Israel.

Well-connected kids from wealthy families can afford not to take the “education” part of “higher education” seriously; lower-income students can’t.

The irony is painfully obvious: The left screams about privilege, while the sanctimonious mobs who were forcing classes to be moved online were almost entirely made up of silver-spoon teens self-centered enough to run roughshod over their peers’ college experience.

Also, today’s elite schools propagandize endlessly about “privilege”: If you’re born with the “original sin” of being from a well-to-do family — or even if you’re just white — you’re automatically an “oppressor” unless you obsessively toe the far-left line.

Which leaves too many students seeing this moment as a chance to earn their “Leftist Disrupter” merit badges and bragging rights at future cocktail parties.

Parents, that is, are paying through the nose for mandatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” indoctrination that stamps out not just diversity of thought, but simple common sense.