If universities are going to put themselves up for sale, then the Internal Revenue Service should tax them.

That’s the only conclusion to draw from the latest proposed realignment in college athletics, or rather, the latest round of what economist Andrew Zimbalist termed “mergers and acquisitions.” One of these days, campuses will be auctioned on eBay.

NCAA member schools have become so fixated on cold hard cash that they’ve forgotten to even feign an interest in sports-as-education and no longer bother to hide their real underlying motive: profit.

This is baldly apparent in the machinations of the Atlantic Coast Conference to expand to 12 teams, to create a super-conference that can further corner TV rights fees and bowl payouts. The ACC’s attempt to acquire Miami and two other Big East schools is nothing more than “a hostile takeover,” Zimbalist said.

Not one student, athlete or fan will benefit from this arrangement, if it happens. It will do nothing to improve campus life or competition, and in fact may do harm, by jury-rigging yet another unnatural commercial alliance that threatens the others, triggering a wave of conference splits and mergers across the country.

There’s not a single motive at work here except for the profit of ACC member schools. Fine. In that case, tax them.

The NCAA has long enjoyed special tax and other legal protections from Congress by virtue of the claim that collegiate athletics is educational and nonprofit — despite the fact that it has its own marketing and licensing arm, an annual budget of more than $270 million, and an executive pay scale that rivals that of any other large business. (But then, it also has a powerful lobbying presence on Capitol Hill.) It’s time for an audit.

It’s called unrelated business income. If a university is going to do things that are profit-like and unrelated to the central mission of a school — such as jump conferences purely for TV money, and engage in a $20 million Bowl Championship Series cartel — then the profit should be subject to levy.

The IRS needs to wake up, and send a message, and the message would be this:

“It would simply tell them that if they’re going to act like they’re in the business world, they should get taxed like the business world,” Zimbalist said.

Zimbalist is an economics professor at Smith College who has written an authoritative study of the NCAA, “Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-Time College Sports.”

He contends, “They have tax privileges, and then there is the major privilege of not having to pay players.

So if you’re going to take all these benefits of being a college, then you should adhere to a college code, that football is subsumed by academics, and that academics have primacy.”

And if they don’t adhere to that code, what then?

Tax them.