This Is About

This thesis is about words. Specifically, it's about the words that universities use to negotiate their images, power, and how these concepts shape the institutions' relationships with students. This thesis is also about the things that aren't explicitly communicated, the “common sense assumptions” that give these words meaning and the context that makes this meaning possible. The relationship between what is said and how it comes to be said has been previously described as discourse, and this is how I will refer to the information that I will briefly cover.

I will conduct a content analysis of university texts for the primary focus of this thesis. These include promotional materials, which take the form of admission packets, mission statements, as well as general messages from the university (as an independent entity) to its students and the wider community. These texts serve several functions, and it's these functions that can be questioned at the most basic level:

How and what kind of are relationships are established and recreated between students and their particular school? How does it establish authority to make promises and commitments? What kind of power does the university apply and how is the students' empowerment affected by this? What kinds of information is distributed? In what ways is it presented? And how is it made valuable? In what ways can it be considered a distraction? The foundational question which I will comment on by the end of this project is: why should anyone (in this case, the student) care?

I will explain further issues that evolve from these questions in the literature review and data analysis. These interrogations can be aimed at different types of schools, and there's room for a brief comparison between these those schools referred to as “Colleges/ Universities” and those known as “Community Colleges/ Junior Colleges.” Though this will not be a substantial portion of the research, the community college discourse is an important one to introduce. How the messages may be different, and how other power relationships are negotiated play an important part in understanding the context of higher education. It's helpful to see how certain choices are made available/possible to some people and not to others. How these competing messages/ frames are formed makes the purpose of university discourse more apparent.

I will draw secondary forms of data from a few surveys and interviews conducted with students at different stages of their education. While these methods are not my primary focus, they are necessary to examine the validity of my conclusion. Understanding how a student describes the way they formed a relationship with their school is an important step in checking my own biases and data analysis. Derrida said that every decoding becomes another encoding. It's a matter of rooting these judgments within something tangible.