Marc A. VanOverbeke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He

explores the history of education and education policy, and specifically examines the history of educational access and opportunity. His first book,
The Standardization of American Schooling, considered the interconnectedness of secondary and higher education at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which those connections influenced access to college.
VanOverbeke applied the “
Page 99 Test” to his new book,
Playing the Game: How State Colleges Used Athletics to Expand Educational Opportunity, and reported the following:
Playing the Game explores the period between World War II and 1970, when state
colleges expanded rapidly from normal schools or vocational institutes into four-year
colleges and when some first opened as new campuses. Administrators and students
fully embraced athletics as key to this expansion and to the state college mission to be
open and accessible.
Page 99 falls in the middle of a short introduction to the second period in the postwar
development of state colleges (and to the last half of the book). A few of the passages
relevant to an understanding of the whole book are the following sentences from page
99:
…The activism around and through sport reflected the central role that sport had
assumed on these campuses and its significance to collegiate life. Athletics was
both the target of activism and a means of broader protest, and it proved to be a
powerful tool for protesting students who expected their institutions to live up to a
mission of openness and accessibility.
What came in this second period was a more full-throated defense—driven
largely by this student activism—of equality of access, of making college readily
available to greater numbers, and of arguing that colleges had an obligation to
develop the means for students to overcome any challenges that they had in
accessing college and succeeding there.
From 1954 to 1962, state college enrollments doubled to nearly 1 million
students and then to 2.3 million in 1970.
A reader opening to this page will find information on the dramatic growth in enrollment
at state colleges, as well as a sense of how student protests in and through athletics
shaped state colleges between 1962 and 1970. What the reader will not get from this
page is any definition or context for state colleges and their mission of accessibility and
opportunity. Still, I am pleased that the page provides a reasonable overview of the
pages to come, while also showing how the second half builds on the first part.
As detailed in the first part of the book (but not on page 99), administrators embraced
athletics to build public support for their institutions, rebrand from normal schools to
“real” colleges, recruit students, and create a sense of loyalty among players, students,
and community members. The second half of the book, which picks up after page 99,
continues to explore athletics as key to state college growth and shows how students
turned to athletics to promote their goals, dreams, hopes, and wishes. Students used
the same athletic playbook that administrators had adopted in the first period but did so
to pressure their colleges to truly become accessible institutions. Athletics and sports
have been fundamental to state colleges. Page 99 may not provide a full sense of this
role or of the book, but it does highlight the significance of athletics to the development
of state colleges and to the expansion of higher education to greater numbers of
students.
Learn
more about Playing the Game at the Cornell University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue