Epilogue: Roberta J. Park and the ‘impossible dream’: keeping it together for physical education and the academy

Abstract

Can physical education become the renaissance field of the twenty first century, or is it just an impossible dream of one of the world's leading sport historians? This article illuminates, celebrates and contextualizes the remarkable range and depth of Roberta J. Park's intellectual contributions to sport history and physical education in North America and internationally. Her extensive career at the University of California, Berkeley as student, teacher, colleague, administrator and researcher is a powerful example of one woman's agency, determination and success in the hierarchical world of higher education with its ambiguous and shifting attachment to the profession and discipline of physical education and sport science. Systematically opening up the breadth of embodied and gendered practices deemed suitable for examination by sport historians, Park has helped turn a narrow lane into the broad and busy highway sport history has now become. Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ‘Queenmother' of first wave feminists, she has equated the gymnasium with the meeting house and shown an abiding respect for saints with strong bodies.

Notes

*This essay was originally published in the Journal of Sport History 30, 1, (2003): 73–99.

[1] Edel, Writing Lives, 17.

[2] Smith, ‘Biographical Method’, 293.

[3] Park, ‘The Research Quarterly and its Antecedents’, 22.

[4] Park, ‘The Second 100 Years’.

[5] Park, ‘Back Then Gloves’, 97.

[6] Since the main focus of this article is upon scholarly contributions I am referring to Roberta, as I do other authors, as Park.

[7] Park, ‘Back Then Gloves’, 95.

[8] Ibid., 92.

[9] Noble andWatkins, ‘So, How Did Bourdieu Learn To Play Tennis?’, 520.

[10] Bourdieu, A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

[11] Park, ‘Back Then Gloves’, 96.

[12] Although Park studied the history of sport and physical education as an undergraduate, she wrote later that ‘much of the published history of physical education is too narrowly informed; few physical education departments, it would seem, require their major students to study history … part of the responsibility for the impoverished state of history within physical education belongs to those colleagues who mistakenly believe that intellectual rigor is the exclusive prerogative of experimental science’. Park, ‘The Future of Graduate Education’, 194–5.

[13] Park, ‘Back Then Gloves’, 96–7.

[14] Park, ‘A Gym of Their Own’, 24.

[15] Park, ‘For pleasure? Or Profit?’. See also Park, ‘A Gym of Their Own’, 24.

[16] Park, ‘Physiologists, Physicians’; Park, ‘Athletes and Their Training’, 137.

[17] For example, she provides a detailed examination of Harvard's BS programme in anatomy, physiology and physical training that on paper she says matched or exceeded in academic rigour the best undergraduate curricula that exists today. Of interest were the circumstances that surrounded the programme's inception and rapid demise – possibly providing a caution to recent debates concerning the future of physical education. Park, ‘The Rise and Demise of Harvard's BS Program’.

[18] Park provides a detailed discussion of the programmes and curricula that were developed at this time in her McCloy Research Lecture: ‘Health, Exercise and the Biomedical Impulse’, 133–4.

[19] Park, ‘For Pleasure? Or Profit’, 199. In the Harmon gym ten hours a week were set aside for the women's exclusive use. Dr Mary Bennett Ritter was appointed as medical examiner to assist the women in the gymnasium. Later, Ms Phoebe Apperton Hearst would donate Hearst Hall for the women's use. A condition of the bequest was that two years of physical education would be required of all first-and second-year women students.

[20] Park, ‘Health, Exercise and the Biomedical Impulse’, 134.

[21] Park, ‘A Long and Productive Career’, 297–8.

[22] The group major for the AB degree was approved in 1914 and had a strong focus upon teacher preparation. There were separate departments for men and women from 1914 to 1942. Park, ‘For Pleasure? Or Profit’, 199, 195.

[23] Bill Phillips remembers Henry as a poor lecturer, best in a small graduate seminar or one on one: ‘He could reduce people to tears and dejection very quickly with questions’. Quoted in Barnes, ‘Franklin M. Henry’, 214.

[24] Park, ‘A Long and Productive Career’, 300.

[25] Ibid., 301.

[26] Franklin Henry, talk given at the Western Academy of Physical Education, 17 March 1965, 2.

[27] Prior to 1959 for a number of years the AB degree had been called a group major of physical education in the College of Letters and Science.

[28] Bob Morford, Speech on the Occasion of Franklin Henry's Retirement at Strawberry Canyon, Berkeley, n.d., 3.

[29] Justification of Request by University of California, Berkeley that the State Board of Education declare the major in physical education to be academic, as provided by the Education Code, section 13188(a), 11 March, 1964, 1.

[30] Park, ‘Time Given Freely’, 99–125.

[31] Ibid., 103.

[32] Her dissertation focused on motor development in adolescents.

[33] Espenschade became vice-chairperson of the department from 1959 to 1968 in charge of the Division for Women's Physical Education.

[34] Park, ‘Time Given Freely’, 104.

[35] Park would point out, of course, that until quite recently, most physical educators carried out multiple responsibilities in teaching, programme administration, professional service and often athletics. Few had the luxury of devoting the majority, or even a substantial portion of their time to original (more likely applied) research. Park, ‘G. Lawrence Rarick’, 185.

[36] Park, ‘Time Given Freely’, 117.

[37] Interestingly, Park saves the title ‘Father of Motor Development’ (which may of course have been designated by someone else), for Larry Rarick who was recruited to Berkeley by Espenschade herself. It presses me to ask, do we have no mothers in sport science?

[38] Smith, ‘Biographical Method’, 289, 292. By the same token, I too have been constantly aware of the need to consider my own role in intruding into the life and work of my subject and making decisions about selection and focus which affect the construction of knowledge and understanding of the subject matter.

[39] Though the death of Frank Kleeburger in 1942 led to the merging of the men's and women's departments of physical education, the teaching of physical education in the public schools remained its central function until the 1960s, when Henry's and others' influences sharpened the focus of the department upon the scientific/scholarly enterprise.

[40] See for example, Park, ‘British Sports and Pastimes in San Francisco’; Park, ‘German Associational and Sporting Life’; Park, ‘Sports and Recreation Among Chinese American Communities’; Park, ‘Private Play and Public spectacle’; Park, ‘San Franciscans at Work’.

[41] Larry Rarick later became a useful research/practitioner role model in the department that she would document in 1997. Anna Espenschade was largely responsible for recruiting him from Wisconsin, saying that ‘almost certainly he is the finest scholar in physical education in the United States’. Following the path of Franklin Henry, Rarick took on the task of developing a PhD programme for the department with a dedicated focus upon science and scholarship in the disciplines comprising physical education. Park, ‘G. Lawrence Rarick’, 186.

[42] Weber, ‘Gymnastics and Sports’, 70.

[43] Park was supervisor for 17 years, moving from assistant to associate to supervisor.

[44] In particular it was a chance discovery of an extraordinary number of references to physical education in eighteenth-century French political and educational texts that stimulated her interest in historical research.

[45] Park, ‘The Philosophy of John Dewey and Physical Education’; Park, ‘Education or Entertainment’; Park, ‘Stephanie-Felicité du Crest’; Park, ‘Education as a Concern of the State’; Park, ‘Josef Neef and William Maclure’; Park, ‘The California Committee’, 12, 22; Park, ‘The Growth of Concern’; Park, ‘Harmony and Cooperation’; Park and Heiser, ‘Total Involvement’; Park, ‘Alternatives and ‘Other Ways’; Park and Heiser, ‘School Programs’.

[46] Weber, ‘Gymnastics and Sports’, 70.

[47] Park, ‘Stephanie-Felicité du Crest’, 39, 43.

[48] Park, ‘The Growth of Concern’, 117.

[49] For example, in Leonard and Affleck's detailed ‘comprehensive’Guide to the History of Physical Education, one can barely find glimpses of female physical educators or their systems and practices.

[50] Park, ‘Sport History in the 1990s’, 96.

[51] Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination’.

[52] Perrot, Writing Women's History.

[53] Berryman, ‘Preface’, 5.

[54] Park, ‘The Rise and Development of Concern’. Park, indeed, points out that it was not in her mind to try to counter the male-centred approach, but simply a matter of expediency to focus upon largely untilled soil.

[55] Park, ‘The Use of Hypotheses in Sport History’, 27.

[56] Ibid., 27. Here she quotes Elton, The Practice of History, 62–8.

[57] Ibid., 29.

[58] It was about this time that Park embarked upon a collaboration with a younger colleague, Janet C. Harris, to produce an anthology entitled Play, Games and Sports in Cultural Contexts.

[59] Park, ‘The Use of Hypotheses’, 33.

[60] Zeigler, ‘Issues and Problems’, 22.

[61] Park was elected to the academy in 1979.

[62] Park, ‘Research and Scholarship’.

[63] Park, ‘Sport History in the 1990s’, 97.

[64] Ibid., 97.

[65] Ibid., 101.

[66] Ibid., 102.

[67] Ibid., 103.

[68] In her paper on ‘History of Research on Physical Activity and Health’, Park said: ‘It is time we historians contribute more broadly to the work upon which our field rests and it is time that our colleagues in the biomedical and physiological domains support and lend their expertise to good historical endeavours’: 283.

[69] For example she took very seriously the need to inform doctoral students in exercise physiology and other scientific fields about the history of their domain, reading widely in the history of medicine and science to support their studies and maintain their interest in the larger context of exercise and sport science.

[70] My thanks to Roberta Park for showing me this open letter written to the Department of Physical Education at Berkeley on 15 April 1982.

[71] She stated that ‘a realistic assessment of the contemporary scene should inform us that we face formidable tasks. It would be foolish to minimize the difficulties that must be overcome’. Park, ‘The Second 100 Years’, 19.

[72] Ibid., 11.

[73] In both instances, the major contributions were scarce institutional resources and conflicts among involved and aspiring faculty.

[74] See for example, Park, ‘The Emergence of the Academic Discipline’; Park, ‘Research and Scholarship in the History’; Park, ‘Science, Service’; Park, ‘On Tilting at Windmills’.

[75] Park, On Tilting at Windmills', 248–50.

[76] Park, ‘The Second 100 Years’, 15; see also Park and Eckert, New Possibilities? New Paradigms!.

[77] Park, ‘Edward M. Hartwell’; Park, ‘Physiologists, Physicians and Physical Educators’.

[78] Park, ‘Research and Scholarship in the History’, 95.

[79] One reason we sense so much fragmentation in our own field, she says, is that we lack an adequate understanding of its origins and the extent to which many important social, cultural and ideological issues coalesced in physical education at the turn of the century: ‘The Future of Graduate Education’, 194.

[80] Park, ‘ On Tilting at Windmills’.

[81] Park, Measurement of Physical Fitness, 24.

[82] Park, ‘For Pleasure? Or Profit’, 201.

[83] This is certainly the case at the University of British Columbia and at a number of other research universities in Canada.

[84] Elizabeth Cady Stanton quoted in Park, ‘All the Freedom of the Boy’, 19.

[85] Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 77.

[86] Martin, ‘A Professorship and an Office of One's Own’, 128.

[87] See for example, Park ‘Embodied Selves’; Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’; Park and Hult, ‘Women as Leaders’; Park, ‘Contributions of Women to Exercise Science’; Park, ‘Other Voices’; Park, ‘A Gym of Their Own’; Park, ‘Time Given Freely’; Park, ‘All the Freedom of the Boy’; Park and Hult, The Role of Women in Sport'; Park, ‘From Genteel Diversions to “Bruising Peg”’.

[88] Park, ‘All the Freedom of the Boy’.

[89] Smith, ‘What Life Writers Do’, 289.

[90] Park, ‘All the Freedom of the Boy’, 9.

[91] Ibid., 12.

[92] Vertinsky, ‘A Militant Madonna’, 68.

[93] Park, ‘All the Freedom of the Boy’, 14.

[94] Ibid., 22.

[95] Park discusses the performative layers of women's field hockey practices in ‘Symbol, Celebration and the Reduction of Conflict’. Ms. Applebee's summer field hockey camp at Mt Pocono, Pennsylvania, was a place where one could live in a real hockey atmosphere in close association with coaches and women players.

[96] Hult, ‘The Governance of Athletics’, 73.

[97] Park and Hult, ‘Women as Leaders’, 40; see also Park and Hult, ‘The Role of Women in Sport’.

[98] Mangan and Park, From Fair Sex to Feminism.

[99] Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society’.

[100] Mangan and Park, From Fair Sex to Feminism, 59.

[101] Special Issue on Sport and Gender, Journal of Sport History, 18 (1) (1991).

[102] Connell, Gender and Power.

[103] Park, ‘Physiology and Anatomy are Destiny’, 63.

[104] Park, ‘A Decade of the Body’.

[105] Ibid., 82. This was not, of course, a new thought. Park demonstrates her interest in the symbolic aspects of the sporting, healthy body in ‘Hermeneutics, Semiotics’.

[106] Park, Guest Editor's Introduction, Journal of Sport History 18 (1) (1991), 6.

[107] Park, ‘Action as Moral Necessity’.

[108] Park, ‘Boys into Men’, 51–62.

[109] Park, ‘Mended or Ended’. See also Park, ‘Muscle, Mind and Agon’; Park, ‘The University of California-Stanford University Response’; Park, ‘Athletics at Berkeley’; Park, ‘High Protein Diets’; Park, ‘Healthy, Moral and Strong’; Park, ‘Biological Thought’.

[110] Park, ‘Mended or Ended’, 128, quoting a 1985 article in Physician and Sports Medicine.

[111] Park, ‘Back Then Gloves’, 96.

[112] Park, ‘A Decade of the Body’.

[113] In a later article Park again commented upon the proliferation in the ‘body’ literature of images of weak, disordered (or disorderly) and disarranged bodies that have been a major focus of cultural studies. Park, ‘Cells or Soaring?’.

[114] Park's use of cultural anthropology far predated the work of current cultural anthropologists claiming to be filling an absent voice in the discourse of theoretical developments in sociocultural studies of women and sport. See for example Bolin and Granskog, Athletic Intruders, 252.

[115] Park, ‘Decade of the Body’, 72.

[116] Berryman and Park, Sport and Exercise Science.

[117] Park, ‘High Protein Diets’.

[118] It is generally, though not universally accepted, says Park, that homo sapiens evolved from a common ancestor Australopithecus Afarensis named by her discoverer Lucy. Park, ‘Human Energy Expenditure’, 186, quotation.

[119] See esp. Tables 7:1 and 7:2 in Park, ‘Human Energy’, 200–1. See also Park, ‘How Active were Early Populations?, and Park, ‘Tradition and Science in the Training of Athletes’.

[120] Park, ‘History of Research’.

[121] Park, ‘Decade of the Body’, 82.

[122] Ibid., 78.

[123] The terms of course are not necessarily distinct. The term exercise science became increasingly popular during and after the 1960s, but before that physical education encompassed much of what now falls under the rubric of exercise science/sports medicine. Park, ‘Contributions of Women to Exercise Science’, 41.

[124] Wrynn, ‘Contesting the Canon’, 245. Alison's doctoral dissertation was entitled ‘The Contributions of Women Researchers to the Development of a Science of Physical Education in the United States’, University of California, Berkeley, 1966. Paula Lupcho somewhat earlier had also completed a PhD dissertation examining the early years of the professionalization of physical education. Completed in 1986, her topic was ‘The Professionalization of Physical Education, 1885–1906’, University of California, Berkeley.

[125] Susan Zieff, ‘From Badminton to the Bolero’, 2. Susan's dissertation topic was ‘The Medicalization of Higher Education: Women Physicians and Physical Training, 1870–1920’, University of California, Berkeley, 1993. In a special issue of the Journal of Sport History on ‘Ethnicity, Gender and Sport in Diverse Historical Contexts’, Park also wrote about Chinese American Communities in ‘Sports and Recreation Among Chinese American Communities’.

[126] Captain, ‘Racial Advancement through Exercise’; Vertinsky and Captain, ‘More Myth Than History’. Gwendolyn's substantial MA thesis was entitled ‘Social, Religious and Leisure Pursuits of Northern California's African American Population: The Discovery of Gold through World War II’, University of California, Berkeley, 1995.

[127] Deane Lamont, ‘Sport and Leisure in the Building of an Urban Community: The Case of Oakland, California, 1850–1906’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1996.

[128] These spanned a variety of topics, for example, Shoichi Fukushima, ‘Bushido in Tokugawa Japan: A Reassessment of the Warrior Ethos’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1984; Jamie Warren, ‘An Analysis of Change in a Non-Profit Health and Fitness Organization: Micro and Macro Perspectives’, MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1990; Jerrod Schenewark, ‘Strong to Save: The United States Navy's Athletic and Fitness Programs Conducted at Treasure Island and St Mary's, 1941–1945’, MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. Park also chaired a considerable number of other MA degrees under the comprehensive examination plan at Berkeley.

[129] Park, ‘The Future of Graduate Education’, 196.

[130] In 1998, an extremely supportive review report called for an increase in faculty. The committee noted that Berkeley's AB major already was an intellectually rich and diverse human biology major reflecting liberal education at its best.

[131] Whether or not she would have succeeded is a moot point, but she could have insisted upon the department having an impartial hearing before all the duly established committees and she believed that the department was well able to make its case for survival.

[132] Park, ‘For Pleasure? Or Profit’, 203. Janet Harris, a former colleague of Park at Berkeley, told me that Roberta was very successful in a number of academic battles on campus through the years and that one of her favourite tactics (though by no means the only one) was one she articulated as ‘lurk and pounce’. The goal was to wait for the ideal moment to move forward with a plan and then aggressively move when the time was right. (Correspondence with Janet C Harris, 8 Dec. 2003, in possession of the author.)

[133] Park, ‘For pleasure? Or Profit?’, 204. Park quotes a Daily Californian headline in 1999 outlining this plan.

[134] Park and Kantor, The University at the Turn of Both Centuries.