Varieties of Diversity Scripts

Universities are simultaneously tasked with producing knowledge and upholding excellence, while also enacting equality and meritocratic participation amidst global moves toward the democratization of education. Universities in different national contexts have been implicated in this tension, and diversity has emerged as an increasingly expected institutional value in higher education systems worldwide. Using university-level discursive and organizational data, this project studies varying meanings and manifestations of diversity in global higher education and the tension within and over the values and missions of excellence, meritocracy, and diversity in an era of intensifying pushback against diversity initiatives.

The study spans five empirical sites, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Turkey, and India. These nations, while highly connected to global higher education frameworks, exhibit distinct historical orientations and societal organization of diversity, and their university systems are positioned differently in the competitive global ecology. The project uses text data by scraping university websites (all universities in the UK, Germany, and Turkey, and a stratified random sample in the US and India).  The resulting dataset will be analyzed using a variety of computational analytical methods, including structural topic modeling, word embeddings, and semantic analysis, to systematically map the contours of diversity discourse and its associated dimensions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, race, class, ability) and key pillars (internationalization, excellence, inclusion, equality). These will be complemented by qualitative analyses of university policy and organizational commitments to diversity, as well as interviews with university leaders, sampled from the initial dataset, to enhance understandings of the evolving conceptualizations of diversity in higher education, both reinforcing and challenging equality and meritocracy.