I Feel Like It’s All for the White Students: Diversity Ideology in Higher Education

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. College Students' Understandings of Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

This qualitative study investigates the role diversity and inclusion initiatives and discourse play in reproducing whiteness at four small, predominantly white, private liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. I conducted interviews with student activists who helped write demands for their administrations following the events at Mizzou in November 2015 and one administrator at each college. I also analyzed an archive from The Chronicle of Higher Education to understand the way the word “diversity” is used in higher education discourse and ideology. I find that diversity ideology is often used to reinforce whiteness within PWIs and propose a Cycle of Diversity Ideology at Predominantly White Institutions to better understand the process by which student activism has been bureaucratized within higher education.

Author

• Mikayla Mitchell, University of Illinois at Chicago