As the University of North Carolina sport scandal begins to take off, pay attention to the details. People use phrases like sports culture all the time (Penn State, we are told, has to confront its sports culture) but until you look at things like the background of the trustees at Auburn or the background of the people who run the academic support program for athletes at North Carolina, you don’t grasp the reality.

UD attended a university sports conference a couple of years ago, here in Washington, where a high-ranking administrator at a local university demanded to know why coaches and coaching staff were not professors. They are teaching, after all; and erasing the line between coaches and professors will heal the rift between athletics and academics, making the university one big happy family.

If it seems a grotesque idea, it shouldn’t. It’s already being implemented, in a way, at a lot of universities, where the president is little more than a sports nut with impressive corporate or political ties, several of the trustees played football or basketball for the school, and plenty of professors sit on sports-oversight committees and don’t do anything other than enjoy the free tickets and other perks they get to make sure they don’t do anything.

“The athletic enterprise has grown so large and so remunerative that it may not be appropriate at universities anymore,” said Lew Margolis, a [University of North Carolina] public health professor.

Yes, it has grown into the university, to the point where we’re supposed to shed tears because Penn State and its surrounding towns and villages will go bankrupt because of football sanctions. Penn State created and sustained a happy seamless valley where children got fucked in its showers by one of its coaches and now just because of that you’re going to remove the very basis of our economy and indeed of our valley life itself?

Take it out of universities. It’s of course fully appropriate for the larger culture, which laps up the much viler world of professional football. But it is really rather inappropriate at universities.