[T]he Jockocracy [is] a faction of immense power at most public and many private universities despite being utterly alien to education, scholarship or learning in any form. This consists of the administrators and chief functionaries of the athletic programme, most notably the coaches heading the school's football and basketball teams.

Such programmes are run for the economic benefit of these worthies while also enriching media outlets, purveyors of jock-related trinkets, and manufacturers of athletic shoes.

Their viability depends, ultimately, on the eagerness of young athletes, typically profoundly deficient in academic skills, to be ruthlessly exploited while largely surrendering their personal autonomy.

The underlying looniness of the situation is epitomised by the fact, no doubt mind-boggling to most non-Americans, that at a university with a 'big-time' team, the football coach will earn eight or nine times as much as the most distinguished professor.

Athletics is the most hypocritical, corrupt, cynical, vicious and depraved aspect of university culture and, therefore, it is the one aspect of university culture unreservedly approved of by politicians, businessmen and the general public.