The next time Chris Matthews and Hardball embark on a college campus tour, here’s a topic: the sleazy politics of student government campaigns.

Yes, be reassured that while parents shell out $60,000 a year for a kid’s tuition, their beloved offspring can still get financial aid, albeit secretly, if they’re conservative candidates for campus office.

Just ask Michael Vasquez, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who parlayed a tip and Freedom of Information Act requests to break open a story that tracks how a right-wing group is wielding influence by funneling thousands of dollars to candidates for student government.

This is an exposé — and not from a left-wing website or blogger but the Chronicle of Higher Education — of Charlie Kirk, a frequent Fox News pundit, and his nonprofit Turning Point USA, which is a de facto super PAC for conservatives’ student government campaigns.

Why care? Well, some student leaders have had an impact on state legislation. One played a big role in Colorado outlawing “free speech zones” on campuses. But at Ohio State and the University of Maryland at College Park, student candidates were outed for violating spending rules.

We may have the image of student government as a high-minded breeding ground for future politicians. This, however, is a tale of corruption and of stealthy attempts to influence.

Vasquez covered the Florida legislature and, he said Monday, “I can safely say that state lawmakers (both Republican and Democrat) routinely wade into education issues that they don’t fully understand. The number of poorly conceived and outright harmful education bills that are filed on a regular basis is staggering.”

That’s where the symbolic power of student body presidents can be crucial. They can prod forward passage of an idea, even if it’s a bad one.

This investigation took about seven weeks. An old source mentioned to Vasquez how Turning Point seemed to be gaining influence. There had already been some reporting by a few campus papers, but Vasquez then filed FOIA requests to universities for campaign finance reports filed by student candidates.

“This was a frustrating experience,” he says, with most coughing up only heavily redacted counts due to student privacy laws.

The Chronicle learned of student expenditures but generally not of their donors. Still, the expenses did lead, for example, to an Oregon T-shirt vendor who was paid $7,500 directly by Kirk.

Then there were 990 tax form filings by Turning Point and email records from the University of South Florida. Some documents were leaked to him by student government leaders or former Turning Point members.

Unlike the larger political universe, there are limited downsides to student skullduggery. That’s even as Turning Point urges candidates to keep its support a secret and students submit fraudulent finance reports. As Vasquez said Monday:

“Because it’s just ‘student government,’ there are no real penalties other than being potentially disqualified from the race. But when real politicians falsify these campaign finance documents, they can go to jail.”

Disney reports earnings today

Inevitably, ESPN’s performance will be under a microscope. MarketWatch reminded readers that recent layoffs are a pittance when it’s paying the NFL $2 billion to air just 17 games per season.

The Wall Street Journal cuts the company some slack. It argues that the numbers “could soon stabilize” and highlights one analyst’s thesis that a sharply declining subscriber base could be overcome in part by the ability to get hefty distribution fees from pay TV distributors and streaming services.

$3.9 billion deal

“TV station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. said Monday it is acquiring Tribune Media Co. for $3.9 billion, a deal that would create a behemoth with more negotiating leverage over programmers and distributors and the ability to launch new channels or wireless streaming services.”