How bizarre to find this sentence in a review of a new book about big-time university football. The reviewer recounts (and the book recounts) a routinely sordid chapter in the life of a routinely sordid sports whore – the University of Tennessee – and then the reviewer suddenly offers that phrase: unbecoming of a university.
UD was pulled up short by it, since never in her long athletics-blogging life has it occurred to her to consider more than a handful of the sports factories about which she writes universities. She doesn’t write about them because they are universities. She writes about them because they are illegitimate recipients of state and federal tax dollars and tax breaks because someone thinks they are universities. She writes about them because maybe if enough people realize they are not universities they will be shut down and we won’t have to keep paying for them.