In the fall of 1984, I entered the field of education as a high school English teacher, assigned the exact room in which I had been a student and where my mentor, Lynn Harrill, had taught before moving on to a district-level job.

Oddly, 18 years later, I transitioned to higher education after completing the same doctoral program as Lynn; the odd part is that I again filled the position Lynn left to return to public education. My office then and now was designed by Lynn as the education department was moving into a new building just as he left and I was hired.

Over my 33 years as an educator, I have acquired expertise and experience in two fields, education and English, and in two levels of formal education, K-12 public and university/college.

I entered education because I recognized early that although I excelled in and benefitted greatly from education, formal education was deeply flawed. Most of the good in formal education survived in spite of the system—because of wonderful teachers who somehow rose above the system and because some of us had privileges that allowed us to excel, again, in spite of not because of.

From about the fall of my junior year of college on, however, I knew that formal schooling tended to reflect and perpetuate the very worst of our society; that although education could be revolutionary and transformational, it often was not.

My career as an educator also began almost exactly at the genesis of the accountability era that has been an epic failure because the political prognosis of educational failure was completely wrong and thus the cures have all been disastrous.

Formal education at all levels in the U.S. suffers from the corrosive influences of privilege and inequity, and since those with power benefit mightily from that privilege and inequity, they will never (and probably are not able to) address those genuine failures—what I would phrase as: We have failed formal education; formal education has not failed us.

The week leading up to Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2017 has been illustrative of the kinds of problems with education that the powers-that-be are apt to ignore and reject, and these examples have come in an unlikely pair: Clemson University head football coach Dabo Swinney and Monica Crowley, who is poised to serve in the Trump administration.

Swinney, as Dave Zirin unmasks, represents an “obscene amount of entitlement” because in the U.S. scholastic sports and coaches enjoy a perverse and warped degree of fanaticism; Zirin continues:

Here is someone working on a refurbished plantation who makes millions of dollars off the sweat and head injuries of overwhelmingly black, unpaid labor, and yet when asked about the Black Lives Matter movement in September, he said, ”Some of these people need to move to another country.”…

College football is a septic tank of entitlement. It’s a fungal culture created by the head coaches of Big Football. Dabo Swinney is the very embodiment of that culture: adrift, clueless, and filthy rich.

Quoted in Zirin’s piece, Clemson assistant professor Chenjerai Kumanyika has confronted his university, the football program at Clemson, and Swinney; as well, Kumanyika has a unique perspective he has shared on Facebook:

Clemson University as a public institution founded in and remaining mostly resistant to moving beyond its racist roots (see AD Carson and Clemson’s Tillman Hall and the Tragedy of Southern Tradition), the National Champion Clemson football team, and Swinney are all powerful examples of the veneers that exist to mask what the powers-that-be claim to be about and what they truly are about.

Let me stress here that Clemson University, Clemson football, and Swinney are not unique, not the worst, and certainly not outliers. The point here is that this is what education is in the U.S.

Hypocrisy is rampant not only in claims about student-athletes but also in the unholy alliance between athletics/coaches and Christianity.

From Zirin to Kumanyika to professor Louis Moore (and many others), scholastic sports has been confronted as a contemporary obscenity in which mostly white men accumulate great wealth and power on the backs of mostly black males—only a very few of which ever gain access to some of that wealth, too few are afforded the educations they are guaranteed, and way too many suffer great physical injury.

Coaches like Swinney and Nick Saban are multi-millionaires, and are allowed to hide behind sanctimonious rhetoric about grooming young men, offering educational opportunities to disadvantaged athletes, and instilling moral fiber through (as Swinney does) coercing players to be baptized and attend church services (again in the context of a public university).

I grew up in a small rural town in the South where the head football coach was God, and a truly despicable person. Decades before the Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky revelation, I witnessed and lived how a person can be lionized and simultaneously daily behaving in ways that were inexcusable around young people.

Scholastic sports at all levels, “septic tank[s] of entitlement,” are systemic problems that create and enable people such as Swinney—again as a notable representative of the systemic inequity, not as the only one, not as a person to be vilified solely for who he is and what he reaps.

The sacred coach dynamic ultimately exposes how those in power live by one set of rules even as they impose upon those beneath them a much more stringent code.

And in that context we have the new brazenness of Trumplandia that flaunts that fact in the faces of everyone throughout the U.S.—personified recently by Monica Crowley who continues to succeed and looks to be a part of a presidential administration even though she is a serial plagiarist.

The Melania Trump speech has already contributed to the new normal that ethical boundaries do not matter to Trump, the Republican party, or his supporters.

Trump embracing Crowley, defending her against “fake news,” and the high likelihood she will not suffer much for these transgressions are no longer surprising.

As with Rand Paul and Joe Biden, the real world’s response to plagiarism is more about privilege than about any real ethical code—one that academics at all levels claim.

More urgent and more telling from the Crowley story are that a major publisher and a major university failed to catch her plagiarism.

Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie, and Nathan McDermott’s Trump aide Monica Crowley plagiarized thousands of words in Ph.D. dissertation is particularly damning—but again, not really about Crowley or Trump or the complete lack of ethical grounding in the U.S.

This is a parallel and ugly narrative about privilege and inequity, parallel to the fanaticism about scholastic sports.

Higher education often wraps itself in claims of academic and ethical rigor, but Crowley’s dissertation and the ability of CNN to detail it when the awarding university did not are where we should be focusing now.

From student-athletes to amateurism to academic integrity (do not forget the University of North Carolina)—there is a colloquial way to explain how Swinney and Crowley reveal what is wrong with education: it is all bullshit.

Bullshit shoveled by the powers-that-be who are created by and profit from the privilege and inequity built into and perpetuated by institutions such as formal education.