Diversities at US Colleges and Universities: Online Diversity Statements at Institutions Employing Chief Diversity Officers

Abstract

In the contemporary U.S. higher education marketplace, college and university mission statements are profiled on almost every institutional website. The extent to which higher education institution (HEI) mission statements reflect isomorphism, attempts at defining market position or unique “conceptual ideas” (Kosmützky, 2012), and similarly, whether they are primarily aspirational, platforms for strategic implementation and institutional meaning-making, or relevant to the experiences of minoritized students are areas of debate in the international literature (Arcimaviciene, 2015; Cortés-Sánchez, 2018; Ortega et al., 2020; Santa-Ramirez et al., 2022). This paper applies quantitative textual analysis to the diversity statements of a subset of American HEIs: those employing a Chief Diversity Officer. We sought to interrogate how concepts such as “race” and “racism” were named and framed by those same statements (Bradley et al., 2018), and indirectly to evidence how students experiencing “race” and “racism” were made visible by institutional descriptions of systems of oppression.

Keywords

• diversity
• systemic oppression
• campus climate
• equity
• religious colleges