Social Justice Resources

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  Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education

  Presents key data that show the continuing educational inequities and opportunity gaps for students of color and low-income students and highlights promising practices that many colleges are taking to advance success for students of all backgrounds.
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  Advancing Diversity and Inclusion through Strategic Multilevel Leadership

  In this article, the authors describe how five institutions have employed the dynamic relationship between university-wide leadership efforts (the macro level); interactions and initiatives within the school, college, or department (the meso level); and efforts by individual instructors and activists (the micro level) to create change at their institutions.

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  Takayama, K., Kaplan, M., & Cook-Sather, A. (2017). Advancing Diversity and Inclusion through Strategic Multilevel Leadership. Liberal Education, 103(3), 22-29.
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  “Cosmetic diversity”: University websites and the transformation of race categories

  Universities are under pressure to represent the ethno-racial diversity of their student bodies in the most favorable light via their websites. We analyzed the race/ethnicity tables and figures featured prominently on the websites of 158 colleges and universities. We found 3 practices that institutions undertake to enhance the appearance of diversity on campus: omission, aggregation, and addition of ethno-racial categories. Universities with the lowest levels of student diversity were the most likely to engage in these practices.

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  Ford, K. S., & Patterson, A. N. (2019). “Cosmetic diversity”: University websites and the transformation of race categories. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 12(2), 99-114. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000092
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  Selling Diversity, Promoting Racism: How Universities Pushing a Consumerist Form of Diversity Empowers Oppression

  How does racism persist and even worsen on college campuses amidst pro-diversity university efforts? From interviewing college students and interrogating university materials, this article argues that public universities' heightened revenue-generating functions inspire them to sell diversity as an attractive quality, divorced from its association with race and social justice. Because diversity has become a strong discourse, its uncritical university marketing turns it into a commodity at the cutting-edge of cultural capitalism: a consumerist diversity.