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:Learn more about Playing the Game at the Cornell University Press website.…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.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.
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.
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.
--Marshal Zeringue
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