A classic Staples commercial from the ’90s shows a father joyfully shopping for back-to-school gear for his grade-school kids while we hear “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” playing in the background.

Shopping for college students heading back to campus is a bit different. Rather than notebooks and pens and Trapper Keepers, today’s college kid needs some quality riot gear and a good lawyer on retainer.

“We’re not going to just be copying encampment, encampment, encampment,” Barnard and Columbia “student organizer” Marie Grosso tells NPR about her plans for the renewed pro-Hamas rallies on campus. “We will be doing whatever actions we choose, escalations if that’s necessary. We will do what is necessary.”

Up in Cambridge, Massachusetts—home to Harvard, MIT, and others—students are keeping themselves sharp in the offseason by “joining weekly demonstrations run by BDS Boston.” If that particular group sounds familiar, it should: BDS Boston was a prominent promoter of something called the “mapping project,” a map of Jewish institutions and locales in the area that should be punished for Israel’s imagined sins. The project was a clear call to arms against Jews in Massachusetts. If your child is attending an elite New England college, there appears to be a good chance they are spending the summer with a progressive reincarnation of the Nazi Student League.

One student demonstrator, according to NPR, grabs a bullhorn and gives a shoutout to all those who “are playing a huge role in the intifada,” a reference to a violent global Jew-hunt. “Resistance is always justified when people are occupied — by any and all means necessary,” she shouts approvingly of the Hamas murder-and-sexual-torture campaign that started the current war.

So what are colleges doing to prepare for the fall semester of war and pizza? Columbia, regional capital of the tentifada, is restricting campus to students and their registered guests. According to NPR, the school is “considering” allowing university security officers to make arrests. Harvard is drafting rules that would forbid chalk writing on sidewalks—no justice, no hopscotch—and require pre-approval for signage around campus. “Nothing should be affixed to University property, including the exterior of buildings, doors, windows, fences, entry posts, gates, utility or flag poles, waste containers, existing signage, walls, floors, or tent structures, except in designated locations,” reads a draft document posted by the Harvard Crimson.

That last policy may sound absurdly difficult and time-consuming to enforce, but that’s the point. New rules are being put into effect when the existing rules weren’t enforced either. This is not a Harvard-specific problem, to be clear. If you want to stop students from breaking campus rules and city laws, you can.

Let’s go back to NPR’s student-activist, Marie Grosso. She was arrested at the Columbia University encampments—twice. What happened to her after that? “Like many students, her criminal charges have since been dropped. And her school suspension was downgraded to probation.” Ah. And the result: “Now she’s among scores of students around the nation using the summer to strategize and plan for what their activism might look like in the fall.”

Columbia’s behavior calls to mind the line from The Simpsons, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

Meanwhile, the colleges also know they’ve got a supply-demand problem. Namely, that their supply of entitled weirdos far outstrips their demand.

“Harvard University added a new essay topic for high school seniors who apply for admission: how they handle disagreements,” reports Bloomberg.

I’m not sure what those admissions officers expect, exactly—that incoming students will be honest? Perhaps. But it sounds like the school would like students to sort themselves by temperament before applying, which is… not how the application process works.

The question is apparently worded thus: “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from this experience?”

Again, the problem on these campuses is that when these students disagree with someone, they chant genocidal slogans at them. And where are they learning the genocidal slogans? In many cases at the university. They are taking classes in subjects like “colonialism” and “decolonization” that fabricate the history of the world to such an extent that they might as well be flat-earthers. The students are told that while they might think that Jews are from Judea, reality is actually a Scientology-like story about aliens and secret races.

Which brings us to the most sensible line in NPR’s report. Richard Scheines, the dean of humanities at Carnegie Mellon University, explains that the school needs to model the values it hopes to see reflected back at it from students. “Education,” Sheines says, “is what we do.”

Maybe. But it’s not what Harvard does. It’s not what Columbia does. And it’s not what countless other “elite” schools do. In the end, that’s the root of the problem, and it can’t be fixed by banning sidewalk chalk.