Education, Faculty of
Educational Studies (EDST), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Xu, Zhenyang
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Although re/branding work has been understood by many higher education institutions as a measure to respond to challenges of reductions of public funding and increased national and global competition among universities, some Western universities also employed branding work as a public relations strategy. In this study, I specifically look at how two prestigious higher education institutions, Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, updated their institutional logos to respond to internal and/or external pressure to address racism. Changing institutional logos is just one case in the larger contexts of branding as symbolic politics; other examples include renaming a faculty, removing a statue on campus, and so forth. By arguing that updating institutional logos is a non-performative technique to address racism but a performative action for branding, this study asks: how did Harvard Law School and Imperial College explain the reasons for updating their institutional logos; how was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process; to what extent do they acknowledge their colonial and racist past and present; and what were the debates and tensions around the decision of updating the institutional logos? Methodologically, this research is a qualitative study and I draw on Critical Discourse Analysis to interpret unequal power relations embedded in discourse from university leaders and students. I primarily collected data including statements and announcements made by university leaders and faculty, committee reports, relevant quotes reported in news articles, social media pages launched by student activists, and petitions written by students. My findings suggest that updating institutional logos can be a non-performative action that fails to lead to substantive institutional changes to address racism and become more inclusive. I also noted that as removing controversial logos might serve the need of improving institutional brands, the rhetoric of change thus reflects an interest convergence.
RETHINKING BRANDING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: UPDATING INSTITUIONAL LOGOS IN RESPONSE TO ANTI-RACIST ACTIVISM by Zhenyang Xu B.A., Wenzhou-Kean University, 2019 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Educational Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) June 2021 © Zhenyang Xu, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Rethinking Branding in Higher Education: Updating Institutional Logos in Response to Anti-racist Activism submitted by Zhenyang Xu in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Educational Studies Examining Committee: Dr. Michelle Stack, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisor Dr. Sharon Stein, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. André Elias Mazawi; Professor, Department of Educational Studies, UBC Additional Examiner iii Abstract Although re/branding work has been understood by many higher education institutions as a measure to respond to challenges of reductions of public funding and increased national and global competition among universities, some Western universities also employed branding work as a public relations strategy. In this study, I specifically look at how two prestigious higher education institutions, Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, updated their institutional logos to respond to internal and/or external pressure to address racism. Changing institutional logos is just one case in the larger contexts of branding as symbolic politics; other examples include renaming a faculty, removing a statue on campus, and so forth. By arguing that updating institutional logos is a non-performative technique to address racism but a performative action for branding, this study asks: how did Harvard Law School and Imperial College explain the reasons for updating their institutional logos; how was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process; to what extent do they acknowledge their colonial and racist past and present; and what were the debates and tensions around the decision of updating the institutional logos? Methodologically, this research is a qualitative study and I draw on Critical Discourse Analysis to interpret unequal power relations embedded in discourse from university leaders and students. I primarily collected data including statements and announcements made by university leaders and faculty, committee reports, relevant quotes reported in news articles, social media pages launched by student activists, and petitions written by students. My findings suggest that updating institutional logos can be a non-performative action that fails to lead to substantive institutional changes to address racism and become more inclusive. I also noted that as removing controversial logos might serve the need of improving institutional brands, the rhetoric of change thus reflects an interest convergence. iv Lay Summary Updating university logos has been used by some university leaders as a public relations strategy to respond to anti-racist activism. This thesis argues that although fundamentally challenging the colonial and racist patterns in Western universities is difficult, updating a logo may be perceived by the institution as a simpler solution to relieve the pressure from activism. I argue that changing a logo alone would not make a university less racist and more diverse but would distract the public’s attention from tackling systemic racism to updating a logo, and updated logos can further improve institutional brands. By looking at what and who is present and absent in the discourse of people’ debates, this thesis further explores the difficulties and complexities of students’ roles on media in challenging and maintaining inequalities in Western higher education. v Preface The following thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work of the author, Zhenyang Xu. vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ...................................................................................................................... iv Preface ...................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ vi List of Tables ....................................................................................................................... ix List of Figures ........................................................................................................................x List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. xii Dedication ...........................................................................................................................xiv Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................1 1.1 Personal Positioning.................................................................................................4 1.2 Purpose of the Study ................................................................................................7 1.3 Research Questions ..................................................................................................8 1.4 Significance of the Study .........................................................................................9 1.5 Structure of the Thesis .............................................................................................9 Chapter 2: Literature Review ............................................................................................. 12 2.1 Neoliberalism ........................................................................................................ 12 2.2 Academic Capitalism ............................................................................................. 14 2.3 Internationalization of Higher Education ................................................................ 15 2.4 Ethics and Internationalization ............................................................................... 19 2.5 Marketization of Higher Education ........................................................................ 21 2.6 Branding in Higher Education ................................................................................ 23 2.6.1 Branding Strategies ............................................................................................ 25 2.6.2 Critiques on Branding ........................................................................................ 26 2.7 Racism and Anti-racism in Higher Education ......................................................... 29 2.8 Diversity Work in Higher Education ...................................................................... 31 vii Chapter 3: Methodology ..................................................................................................... 34 3.1 Research Traditions ............................................................................................... 34 3.2 The Concept of Discourse ...................................................................................... 36 3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis .................................................................................... 37 3.4 The Present Study .................................................................................................. 40 3.5 Data Collection and Selection ................................................................................ 40 3.5.1 Harvard Law School Data .................................................................................. 41 3.5.2 Imperial College London Data ........................................................................... 43 3.6 Data Analysis......................................................................................................... 45 3.7 Limitations of the Study ......................................................................................... 46 Chapter 4: Theoretical Framework .................................................................................... 48 4.1 Non-performativity of Anti-Racism and Diversity Work ........................................ 49 4.2 Interest Convergence ............................................................................................. 52 4.3 Cultural Capital...................................................................................................... 53 Chapter 5: Harvard Law School ........................................................................................ 54 5.1 Background ........................................................................................................... 54 5.1.1 Rhodes Must Fall ............................................................................................... 54 5.1.2 Isaac Royall Family ........................................................................................... 55 5.2 Royall Must Fall .................................................................................................... 56 5.3 Analysis of Removing the Shield ........................................................................... 59 5.3.1 The Creation of the Shield Committee................................................................ 59 5.3.2 Members in the Shield Committee ..................................................................... 61 5.3.3 “Our” Issacs Royall, Jr. ...................................................................................... 63 5.3.4 Not Unique to the Royalls .................................................................................. 66 5.3.5 Retiring the Shield ............................................................................................. 68 5.4 Analysis of the Debates .......................................................................................... 71 5.4.1 Royall Must Fall’s Demands .............................................................................. 71 5.4.2 A Different View ............................................................................................... 74 5.4.3 A Contested Question ........................................................................................ 76 5.5 Discussions ............................................................................................................ 77 viii 5.5.1 Limitations of Royall Must Fall ......................................................................... 78 5.5.2 A Non-performative Change .............................................................................. 81 Chapter 6: Imperial College London .................................................................................. 85 6.1 Background ........................................................................................................... 85 6.1.1 Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racist Protests ...................................................... 85 6.1.2 COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Racism .................................................................... 88 6.2 Decision to Remove the Lattin Motto ..................................................................... 89 6.2.1 The Coat of Arms............................................................................................... 89 6.2.2 ICL Leaders’ explanations ................................................................................. 93 6.3 Petitions from ICL Students ................................................................................... 97 6.3.1 Everyone’s Opinions Matter? ............................................................................. 97 6.3.2 Harm ICL’s Historical Identity? ....................................................................... 101 6.4 Discussions .......................................................................................................... 104 6.4.1 A Non-performative Change ............................................................................ 104 6.4.2 Cultural Capital and Students’ Petitions ........................................................... 107 Chapter 7: Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 109 7.1 Summary of the Research and Findings ............................................................... 110 7.1.1 Research Question 1......................................................................................... 110 7.1.2 Research Question 2......................................................................................... 112 7.1.3 Research Question 3......................................................................................... 113 7.2 Reflection on the Study ........................................................................................ 114 7.3 Contributions of this Study .................................................................................. 116 7.4 Suggestions for Future Studies ............................................................................. 118 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 120 ix List of Tables Table 1: Data of Harvard Law School ....................................................................................... 43 Table 2: Data of Imperial College London................................................................................. 45 x List of Figures Figure 1: Harvard Law School Shield ........................................................................................ 56 Figure 2: Coat of Arms of the Royall Family ............................................................................. 57 Figure 3 Original ICL Coat of Arms .......................................................................................... 90 Figure 4: Updated ICL Coat of Arms ........................................................................................ 91 Figure 5 Royal Coat of Arms of the U.K. .................................................................................. 92 xi List of Abbreviations BAME Black, Asian and minority ethnic BLM Black Lives Matter CDA Critical Discourse Analysis CRT Critical Race Theory HLS Harvard Law School ICL Imperial College London STEM Science, Technology, Engineering and Math xii Acknowledgements I raise my hands to thank the traditional, ancestral, and unceded Musqueam territory for hosting me as an uninvited visitor to live, study and work on the land that the University of British Columbia Vancouver campus is situated on. Both the Musqueam people and the land inspired me to learn about Indigenization and decolonization, and pushed me to reflect on the violent colonial history in North America and its relations to the foundations of higher education. I would like to extend my gratitude to my supervisory committee. To Dr. Michelle Stack, my supervisor, thank you for taking me as your student at a very tough circumstance that courses and research were all switching from in person to online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you for your support on my thesis from choosing the topic to wrapping up the thesis. Thank you for launching weekly online writing sessions to connect with students and make us not feel isolated during the pandemic. To Dr. Sharon Stein who I took three courses with, thank you for being my pro tem advisor when I first came to UBC, and then served as a committee member once I switched to the thesis-based program. Thank you for offering me many new insights in your courses and during our conversations about my thesis. Words are not enough to express my gratitude to Professor André Mazawi, an excellent and caring educator. Thank you for recognizing my potential and passion to conduct in-depth research in higher education. And Thank you for making my transition to a research-oriented student possible, otherwise, the completion of this thesis would not even be possible. Many thanks again to Dr. Michelle Stack, Dr. Sharon Stein, and Dr. André Mazawi for offering generous feedback on the first paper I aimed to publish in an international journal. In addition, thank them for offering letters of recommendation in my Ph.D. applications. Without their support, it would not be possible for me to be accepted to some of the best higher education xiii doctoral programs in the United States, and my admission encouraged me to have more passion and confidence in writing and revising this thesis. Thank you to all professors at the Department of Educational Studies, and UBC that I took a course with or had some opportunities to know and talk with one another including President Santa Ono, Dr. Jennifer Chan, Dr. Mona Gleason, Dr. Deirdre Kelly, Dr. Amy Metcalfe, Dr. Samuel Rocha, Dr. Robert VanWynsberghe, Dr. Pierre Walter, and Dr. Fei Wang. Finally, I would like to thank my family. To my parents, who provided substantial financial and moral support to me for the past two years while I am pursuing this degree in a foreign country. To my grandmother, who always encourages me to climb higher. xiv Dedication To all antiracists around the world.1 Chapter 1: Introduction The concept of branding has gained increasing attention in the field of higher education over the past few decades (Wæraas & Solbakk, 2009). A significant factor is that many Western higher education institutions are facing reductions in public funding and increased national and global competition among universities (Marginson, 2006). Universities focus on the use of branding as part of marketing in a competitive educational marketplace. The impact of these activities on what universities value is an area of increasing interest in higher education literature (Wæraas & Solbakk, 2009). Rebranding, for the purpose of further indicating the value of a higher education institution, is the process of updating an existing brand (Makgosa & Molefhi, 2012). Updating institutional logos is one of the approaches to rebrand an institution, and many universities have changed, modified, or removed their institutional logos over the last few years. A recent example is that Imperial College London (ICL) removed the Latin motto on its coat of arms that it has been using for more than a century (Evanson, 2020, June 30). There are many other cases around the world, for instance, the University of Warwick in the U.K. revealed its new logo in 2015 (Gil, 2015, Alril 24); the City University of Hong Kong in China launched a new marketing logo in 2015 (City University of Hong Kong; 2015, August 4); the University of British Columbia in Canada modified its logo in 2015 (Alden, 2018, October 11); the University of Georgia in the U.S. updated its logo in 2016 (Hale, 2016, September 6); the University of Limerick in Ireland starts to use a new logo in 2019 (University of Limerick, 2019), and so forth. One theory to explain the reasons for higher education leaders' decision to rebrand their institutions is academic capitalism. Academic capitalism indicates that many universities have shifted to more market-oriented fields partially because of a decline of public funding and those universities are thus seeking more revenue from students (Slaughter, 2014). As such, one of the 2 major concerns for university leaders to make decisions on updating their institutional logos to some degree is supposed to be in line with the principle that the change could to some extent satisfy more "customers" and generate more revenue for the institutions in terms of academic capitalism. Besides, there are also other considerations for some university leaders to decide how to rebrand the institutions since higher education has conventionally been considered as a public good, and equity is a public service that often needs to put into consideration (G. Williams, 2016; J. Williams, 2016; Tilak, 2018). Nevertheless, it is often a challenging task for university leadership to make substantive reform of a university, but it is much easier to change a logo. Updating institutional logos may serve as a strategy and non-performative action to promote institutional brands without substantively challenging inequities and systemic racism embedded in the institutions. Nevertheless, changing institutional logos is just one example in the larger contexts of rebranding and symbolic politics, the arguments and findings of this study might also be able to apply to other similar forms of examples such as renaming a faculty, renaming a building, removing a statue on campus and so on. In this study, I chose Harvard Law School (HLS) and Imperial College London as two cases to analyze. Both of them are prestigious higher education institutions in the world in terms of their reputation and global university rankings. In the past five years, the leaders at HLS removed its shield and ICL removed the Latin motto on its coat of arms due to pressure from anti-racist activism. Thus, I look at how leaders at these two universities explained their decisions of updating the institutional logos, how the language of racism and diversity that have been used in their reasoning to analyze unequal power relations, as well as to what extent did the leaders at these institutions acknowledge their colonial history and present. The rebranding decision of updating the institutional logos nevertheless does not always gain support from all 3 parties. Rather, there are often debates and tensions around the decisions of changing the institutional logos. Thus, I also look at how people hold different perspectives regarding the changes and specifically look at who and what is present and absent in reporting about the rebranding exercises to analyze the reproduction or interruption of unequal power relations embedded in the discourse. Overall, this study explores the topic of rebranding as an exercise in reputation politics in higher education. Specifically, how updating institutional logos as a form of symbolic politics and a non-performative action that have been used by some higher education leaders to respond to internal and external pressure from anti-racist activism, but avoid substantive and structural reforms. I study the reasons and implications for practitioners at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London to update their institutional logos and analyze the debates and tensions among people with different perceptions. As for theoretical framework, I draw on Sara Ahmed's (2012) notion of “non-performativity”, Derrick Bell (1980)’s theory of interest convergence, one tenet of Critical Race Theory, and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) culture capital, to frame my understanding of universities' rebranding work and people's debates. Methodologically, I draw on Critical Discourse Analysis to study and interpret the “power” that is imbedded in the qualitative data including statements and announcements made by university leaders and faculty, committee reports, relevant quotes reported on news articles, social media pages launched by student activists, and petitions written by students. My findings suggest that the actions of updating institutional logos alone is not necessarily accompanied by further efforts to address racism and make the university more diverse and inclusive. Rather, it can be a non-performative action and symbolic politics to relieve the pressure of anti-racist activism which also avoided substantive reform to address systemic racism and served a technology to promote so-called 4 diversity excellence. Besides, I noted that updating institutional logos converge the interest of activism and university leadership. In other words, agreeing to satisfy the demands of removing a controversial logo also contributes to the fact that the branding process could serve the interests of leadership who made the decision, which reflects an interest convergence. 1.1 Personal Positioning According to Brenan (2018), higher education can be both reproductive and transformative of existing social differentiation. Specifically, reproduction happens when socially privileged students enter higher education institutions to maintain certain privileges, and potential transformation happens when socially underprivileged students become socially privileged after graduating from universities (Brenan, 2018). Nevertheless, students with socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to get admitted to more prestigious universities and find relatively more prestigious jobs and professions afterward, and vice versa (Brenan, 2018). I am not an exception. My parents were transformed from socially underprivileged to socially privileged by attending higher education. My attendance in universities indicates social reproduction. When I was a child, my grandparents kept telling me that I should be proud of my parents because both of them hold a bachelors' degree, which was very rare in their generations in China to attend colleges and universities. I did not understand what my grandmother was saying because I was not at the age to consider which university to attend. But when I entered high school, I had pressure to get into a good university. Although I did not necessarily like the materials that I was learning in higher school and the environment of fierce competition with my classmates, I studied very hard during my high school, especially the final year, to get a high mark in Gaokao (Chinese National College Entrance Examination) to get into a first-tier 5 university. As a result, I was admitted to Wenzhou - Kean University, a first-tier Westernized university in China, also known as an international branch campus of Kean University in New Jersey. The tuition at Wenzhou - Kean University was over ten times higher than the average tuition that other Chinese universities charged. Most of the instructors were from Global North nations, textbooks and curriculum were imported from the West, and the medium of instruction is English. The quality of education offered by a branch campus was not necessarily good, but an American degree and transcript did facilitate my applications to graduate schools in the West. I received admission letters from many prestigious universities in the world in terms of Western standards such as global university rankings including the University of Hong Kong and the University of British Columbia. In 2019, I enrolled as a graduate student in the higher education program offered by the Department of Educational Studies at UBC. That is how reproduction through education was performed through me because without my parents' educational backgrounds and their financial support, I would not be able to study in these two institutions that I attended. Although I enjoyed certain privileges in China, as a racialized student in North America, I noticed that Western universities situated in the structure of White dominance and Eurocentric hegemony are implicated in the reproduction of racism and colonialism. During my study in Canada, I also encountered some unpleasant experience of discrimination and racism in direct and subtle ways, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. I realized that the Western world and Western universities are not always perfect as many international students from the Global South once imagined. Instead, there is a lot that needs to be changed in Western higher education institutions. For instance, although there are statements of diversity and anti-racism proposed by many universities that helped to reimagine the university as being antiracist and diverse, those 6 commitments are often not followed by actions (Ahmed, 2016). According to Stein (2019), many students are facing more complexity, uncertainty, diversity, inequality, and instability because things under global challenges are changing very quickly, notably during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, many Chinese international students at U.S. institutions are being portrayed as potential spies due to geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. (Haupt & Lee, 2020, August 4); many higher education institutions and students are facing challenges of moving courses online, losing revenue, and political pressure (Lee, 2020, July 8). Therefore, as a graduate student in higher education, I believe my responsibilities include unpacking and working with those complexities and uncertainties and struggling for a more equitable and inclusive environment in higher education institutions. During my study at UBC, I studied problems and challenges around higher education, particularly in the area of internationalization and decolonization in higher education. My major research interests shown in this thesis are highly inspired by my supervisor, Dr. Michelle Stack's work in branding in higher education and global university rankings as well as what I have learned from the course – Foundations of Higher Education taught by Dr. André Mazawi. Their research examines how higher education institutions, media, rankings, and curriculum have helped to perpetuate and reinforce privileges and social inequality (e.g., Stack, 2016, 2020). While with the position of a graduate student, I acknowledge that we students are not innocent as we are also involved and are playing a significant role in both reproducing and interrupting inequalities. I have a unique habit that I like to visit universities in different countries and cities. I often go to the bookstores or souvenir shops in those universities if they have one, and buy some souvenirs and clothes with the university logos on them. Because of this habit, I always keep an 7 eye on university logos and found that many universities including the institutions that I have attended changed or modified their logos. My undergraduate school, Kean University, modified its logo by reorganizing its name and other elements to enhance the university's brand (“Introducing the New Kean University Seal”, 2018), and the University of British Columbia removed the slogan "a place of mind" and two pointers on its logo following a national branding campaign (Alden, 2018). These changes triggered my initial interest in exploring the reasons that universities changed or modified their logos and the associated implications. By reading more higher education literature and news articles related to university logos, I learned that logos are more than just symbols, but updating those logos represents how universities redefined themselves in the age of globalization and neoliberalism, and how rebranding by updating logos served as a tool or distraction for higher education leaders to respond the increasing pressure of the need for racial equality, diversity, and social justice. 1.2 Purpose of the Study The purpose of this study is to investigate the logic of the rebranding decision of updating the institutional logos in some universities. Particularly, those who used updating institutional logos as an approach to rebrand themselves and to respond to the internal and external pressure of the need to address racial inequality and improve diversity and inclusion excellence on campus. I study how those higher education institutions explained their updates, which shed light on some higher education leaders’ attitudes towards anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion embedded in their languages. This thesis also studies how the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion is used in higher education rebranding processes and to what extent leadership and students at these institutions acknowledge their colonial and racialized past and present. 8 Although some leaders in higher education institutions might explain their determination to implement their statements on anti-racism and diversity, their commitments are not often followed by substantive institutional changes. Thus, this study asks to what extent did university leadership engaged in logo changes acknowledge the systemic racism and colonialism embedded in their institutions, and to what extent were university leadership willing to substantively transform their institution and give up certain privileges. Finally, this thesis studies the debates and tensions around the decision of updating the logos at HLS and ICL. By studying the debates and tensions from different groups of people, I consider different people’s understandings of what the institutional logos represent; what did the discourses of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion mean to them; and how did some of them acknowledge their privilege, and how did some of their language maintained and reproduced or challenged and interrupted the status quo of inequalities. 1.3 Research Questions Three research questions will be addressed in this thesis, which are as follows: 1. How did Harvard Law School and Imperial College London explain their reasons for rebranding their institutional logos? 2. How was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, and to what extent do university leadership and students acknowledge their institutions’ colonial and racist past and present? 3. What were the debates and tensions around the updates of institutional logos at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London? 9 1.4 Significance of the Study This study provides new insights of higher education branding beyond the need to respond to the decline of public funding and generate more revenue. Particularly I consider how the branding work may have been done as a form of symbolic politics and non-performative action to respond to anti-racist activism. In higher education research, little has been written about institutional logos and their relationships to branding, anti-racism, and diversity. This study sheds light on how some university leaders used institutional logos as an exercise in reputation politics in higher education. Nevertheless, the institutional logo is just one example, arguments in this study can also be applied to other similar types of changes, such as renaming a faculty or removing a statue on campus. This study also invites higher education practitioners to reflect on their branding work, and suggests that updating institutional logos alone does not effectively address the systemic racism in their institutions. In addition, this study invites students to reflect their participation and roles in the debates around the updates of institutional logos. 1.5 Structure of the Thesis Chapter 1 is the introduction part of this thesis. In this chapter, I gave an overview of what will be written for the whole thesis. I also outlined my positioning as a researcher, research questions, and the significance of the study in this section. Chapter 2 is a review of the literature in the study of higher education that is related to this study. In this chapter, I particularly reviewed peer-viewed journal articles in neoliberalism, academic capitalism, internationalization in higher education, marketization in higher education, branding in higher education, as well as anti-racism, diversity and inclusion work in higher 10 education. Chapter 3 is the review of the methodology. In this chapter, I detailed Critical Discourse Analysis and how I drew on CDA for the analysis of my data. Specifically, I explained how CDA was used to interpret university leaders' decisions of updating their institutional logos and people's debates around the changes. Chapter 4 is the theoretical framework. In this chapter, I specifically introduced Sara Ahmed's illustration of the non-performativity of anti-racism and diversity work in higher education institutions, Bell’s interest convergence, and Bourdieu’s cultural capital. I also explained how these theories and concepts framed my angles of answering my research questions and analyzing the qualitative data. Chapter 5 is the data analysis and the findings of the first case – Harvard Law School. In this chapter, I introduced a student movement – Royall Must Fall happened at Harvard Law School in relation to the shield of Harvard Law School. I also briefly explained the history of Harvard Law School and the Royall Family. With the knowledge of the background of removing the shield, I analyzed documents with respect to Harvard Law School's decisions, student movement's social media posts and argument, as well as some different voices that opposed the decision of removing the shield. Chapter 6 is the data analysis and the findings of the second case – Imperial College London. In this chapter, I introduced the background of removing the Latin motto on the Imperial coat of arms, analyzed how university leaders explained the decision and students’ petitions of demanding university leaders to bring the former coat of arms back. Chapter 7 is conclusions and discussions. This chapter concluded this thesis by discussing the implications of this thesis, reflecting on the limitations and contributions of this study, and 11 suggesting possibilities for future research. 12 Chapter 2: Literature Review In the first four sections of this literature review, I focus on neoliberalism, academic capitalism, marketization, and internationalization in higher education to provide a foundation for understanding the rationale for higher education institutions to launch competitions with each other through branding. In the following sections, I provide understanding and critiques of the branding strategies universities employ to manage competing aims of education. Thereafter, I introduce literature on how universities are working on anti-racism and diversity work as approaches of rebranding, more specifically, designing or updating their institution logos to achieve their competing goals. Finally, I conclude that although much has been written about branding in higher education and there is some research discussing university logos, little research has been done on the relationship between rebranding in higher education and how university leaders use rebranding as a symbolic politics or public relations strategy to respond racial pressure. 2.1 Neoliberalism According to Connell (2010), neoliberalism is “the agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market that has come to dominate global politics” (p. 22). The expansion of the national and international free market is also arguably a significant element of neoliberalism that facilitates the process of globalization (Olssen & Peters, 2005; Connell, 2010; Connell, 2013). Deregulating measures “were among the earliest and most important neoliberal policies”, and further, neoliberalism “seeks to make existing markets wider and to create new markets where they did not exist before (Connell, 2010, p. 23). Notably, free trade and deregulating measures refigured the relationships among government, private 13 enterprise and society, and therefore, more public sectors including education are more involved in the market (Davies & Bansel, 2007). Olssen and Peters (2005) noted that influenced by the rise of neoliberal ideology in the past few decades, the welfare liberal mode has been replaced by free-market economics. This transformation has led to declining public funding for higher education, and thus, universities in the knowledge economy are encouraged to have more partnerships with business and industry fields to create more potential revenue. Connell (2013) suggested that neoliberalism regards education as capital, and thus “education has been defined as an industry, and educational institutions have been forced to conduct themselves more and more like profit-seeking firms” (p. 102). Higher education has thus been redefined as a commodity, for instance, many higher education institutions are increasing their university fees, extracting income by the recruitment of international students, and providing more for-profit programs and services (Knight, 2004; Altbach & Knight, 2007; Connell, 2013). Neoliberal higher education has brought abounding critiques. For instance, Giroux (2002) looked at higher education through how corrosive corporate culture affected higher education institutions to focus on academic leadership and management but ignore their public responsibilities. Giroux (2002) argued that neoliberalism is the most dangerous ideology in contemporary society and corporate culture and leadership are a huge threat to higher education. With the privatization and the rise of the cost of higher education, students from low-income backgrounds are facing increasing difficulty accessing higher education in terms of the affordability, and the quality of education has also been affected due to the high degree of stratification of higher education and a higher proportion of part-time and adjunct faculty (Giroux, 2002). Connell (2013) encouraged educators to think about the nature of education and she criticized neoliberal higher education that “universities, who are supposed to be beacons of 14 truth and critical thinking – become purveyors of spin, image-making, manipulative marketing, organized boasting and sometimes more toxic forms of deceit”(p. 106). Oleksiyenko (2018) argued the factory model of higher education in the neoliberal context resulted in leadership failures and corporate abuse, as well as critical inquiry and academic freedom being discounted in such an unhealthy academic environment. Shahjahan (2014) argued that neoliberal higher education is colonizing and constraining people’s ways of knowing and being in neoliberal context structures, and he suggested that new ways of being, knowing, and doing as transformational resistance should be emphasized to transform the current neoliberal higher education context. 2.2 Academic Capitalism Under the neoliberal political and economic environment, a theory named academic capitalism was developed to explain how higher education institutions integrate into the new political and economic environment (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) used the theory of academic capitalism to study how different players such as faculty, students, administrators in higher education institutions utilize numerous state resources to create new knowledge to satisfy the need of a new economy. According to academic capitalism, under the rise of neoliberalism, there are more entrepreneurial and marketable opportunities created for many segments of universities to work in quasi-markets and markets. Students and institutions are considered as consumers and marketers. Many students and their families see higher education as an investment that will possibly bring them the desired lifestyle, and thus, majors linked to the new economy such as business and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are heavily focused and privileged (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Slaughter, 2014). 15 Higher education institutions also regard their students as output that will bring contributions to institutions such as potential donors (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Walker (2014), in her research on academic capitalism, noted that over time academics have become academic capitalists and are more mindful of the use and distribution of their time to exchange more capital. Walker (2014) also argued that when bringing more money and profit into academia, the quality of professors' work and education universities provide would be negatively affected since more time is invested to generate capital. Since academic capitalism shifted universities to seek and generate more external revenues (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), international students who are charged with high tuitions are considered as good sources of external revenues. The work of internationalization of higher education has thus become increasingly valued to not only promote research and knowledge excellence but also to earn international profits in response to the decline of the public funding from local and national governments (Belanger, Mount & Wilson, 2002; Altbach & Knight, 2007; Zha; 2013; Stein, Andreotti & Susa, 2019). 2.3 Internationalization of Higher Education The rise of neoliberalism and academic capitalism also prompted international mobility for students and scholars in higher education. Altbach and Knight (2007) noted that in the free-trade context, international higher education has been seen as a commodity and higher education as a private good. Although the initial purpose of internationalization might not necessarily be gaining profits, many universities are affected by the cut of public funding from their governments and need to seek more external and international ventures (Altbach & Knight, 2007). 16 Similar to neoliberalism as a dimension of globalization, as Knight (2004) noted, the world of internationalization is also changing by the effect of globalization, and these changes are "becoming increasingly important, complex, and confusing” (p. 5). Although globalization and internationalization are different, they are related processes, in which “globalization has accelerated internationalization activity within universities” and “the intensification of university internationalization activity reinforces accelerated globalization” (Maringe, 2010, p. 17). According to Altbach and Knight (2007), globalization is defined as “the economic, political, and societal forces pushing 21st century higher education toward greater international involvement” (p. 290). As for higher education, the environment that globalization has created made the international dimension of higher education even more important and change more quickly (Knight, 2004). However, internationalization means different things depending on different national contexts, as Buckner (2019) argued that “the benefits of internationalization are localized” (p. 333) and internationalization is understood differently in terms of nations’ positions and policies. Knight (2004) acknowledged that there is no universal definition of internationalization and the meaning of internationalization is also evolving, but it is important to understand the term to analyze the phenomenon as such. Therefore, Knight (1994) proposed a definition of internationalization of higher education that has been widely used, that said, "Internationalization of higher education is the process of integrating an international dimension into the teaching/learning, research and service functions of a university or college" (p. 3). To develop the term internationalization for a broad range of contexts and countries, Knight (2013) proposed an updated version that defines internationalization "as the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of 17 postsecondary education” (p. 2). Nonetheless, de Wit (2014) still argues that “internationalisation in higher education is at a turning point and the concept of internationalisation requires an update, refreshment, and fine-tuning taking into account the new world and higher education order” (p. 97). It is important to note that different countries and even institutions may have different interpretations of internationalization and their implementations are thus varied because of their different “priorities, culture, history, politics, and resources” (Knight, 2004, p. 18). Under internationalization, more international mobilities in higher education such as “study abroad, exchanges, international students or academic mobility” (de Wit, 2014, p. 89) are taking place, and in fact, for more than two decades, “the international dimension has become a central part of higher education policies at the international, national and institutional level” (de Wit, 2014, p. 89). Notably, students mostly move from the Global South to Global North in line with the assumption that education systems and universities in the West are better developed (Altbach & Knight, 2007). Nevertheless, some of the middle-income countries in the Global South are also seeking opportunities to attract international students to promote their international level and gain prestige and income (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Mulvey, 2019; Mulvey, 2020). Knight (2014) proposed the rationales of internationalization of higher education from three different levels, namely international-level rationales, national-level rationales, and institutional-level rationales. For the rationale of internationalization at an international level, competition is increasingly emphasized and thus branding and developing an excellent international reputation for higher education institutions are consequently becoming more important to recruit international students and fee-paying students; offer more for-profit programs; or sell education services (Stensaker, 2007; Chapleo, Durán & Díaz, 2011; Knight, 18 2014; Blanco & Metcalfe, 2020). Regarding the national level, internationalization can facilitate universities to recruit students with excellent academic standings and outstanding professors from around the world to improve their overall competitiveness. Besides, international education activities and cooperation can help countries to boost bilateral ties and interdependency. Internationalization of higher education can also promote global commercial trade, nation-building, and social and cultural development. As for institutional-level rationales, “high academic standards” are significant to the branding competition and thus require higher education institutions that embrace the notion of world-class education to attract the brightest of scholars and students to work and study to gain name recognition. Internationalization can be seen as a method to build up an international reputation and the ability for the university communities, a strategy to gain more revenue for the institutions, a means to develop strategic international education partnerships, and a way to enhance the capacity of research and knowledge production. Most importantly, gaining more income is the core driver for international projects to function in both for-profit institutions and some public universities that are facing the challenge of insufficient budget (Altbach & Knight, 2007). With those reasons in mind, in the past two decades, international activities, projects, and cooperation that many universities strive to work on expanded tremendously in the aspects of volume, scope and complexity (Altbach & Knight, 2007), working on internationalization has also become more and more important to higher education sectors (Zha, 2013). With the evolution of internationalization, Knight (2014) argued that an identity crisis has happened to the work of internationalization in higher education. Knight (2014) noted that “the values of cooperation, partnership, exchange, mutual benefits and capacity building to one that is increasingly characterized by competition, commercialisation, self-interest and status building” 19 (p. 76). In other words, internationalization has arguably become more like international competition, for instance, global university rankings. Therefore, Knight (2014) suggested some common misleading assumptions of internationalization. For instance, an international reputation does not accurately represent the quality of the higher education institution; the number of international students does not necessarily show a more internationalized institutional culture and curriculum, and many international students actually feel marginalized and underrepresented, and tensions related to race and ethnicity also occur on campus; besides, working on improving an institution’s global brand or standing is not the only purpose of a university’s internationalization work. Based on de Wit’s (2014) argument that there is a need to “clarify what is meant and what is not by internationalisation of higher education and what should be the new directions it has to take” (p. 94) and his suggestion of updating the concept of internationalization, many scholars started to critically consider the relationship between ethics and internationalization in higher education. 2.4 Ethics and Internationalization Not only Knight and de Wit rethink and redefine internationalization, other scholars have provided more radical critiques about the internationalization of higher education, and universities that are implementing the work of internationalization. Stein (2016) questioned the ethics of internationalization, and she argued that internationalization brings some ethical challenges, and one of the most significant challenges that Stein pointed out is that the colonial ways of thinking still have an influential impact on the current content of university curricula in all different field of studies, shaping faculty's teaching and students learning in colonial patterns. That said, internationalization reproduces the colonial patterns of knowledge and Eurocentrism 20 in a broader and global context, and according to decolonial critique, the existing global system is inherently violent and unsustainable (Stein & da Silva, 2020). To disrupt the current colonial pattern of international education, although there are no simple solutions thus far, decolonial analysis can be one of the critical approaches and imagining "internationalization otherwise" is also encouraged (Stein, 2016; Stein & da Silva, 2020). Buckner and Stein (2019) argued that although universities are working on engaging the presence of internationalization on campuses, faculty and administrators do not necessarily understand what internationalization is and how internationalization should or could be. For people who are working on internationalization, they might need to ask ethical and political questions of why we should work on internationalization rather than merely focus on practical questions of how we can promote internationalization in universities. Buckner and Stein (2020) suggested that it is important to de-naturalize the current hegemonic assumptions on internationalization, and we might need to consider approaching internationalization as a way to encourage people to examine colonial patterns of international engagement as well as to consider the possibilities of different ways of being and knowing. In terms of international students’ experience, Stein and Andreotti (2016) used the framework of “global imaginaries” to study international student recruitment and their negative and discriminatory experiences. In the global higher education market, Western higher education is regarded as a desirable product, while international students often experience racism and discrimination in a society that Western supremacy is historically and systematically rooted (Stein & Andreotti, 2016). Stein and Andreotti (2016) argued that international students are seen as "cash" because they bring direct financial benefit to the higher education institutions they attend; they are also positioned as "competition" because the West would like to continue to reproduce the current patterns and privileges through higher education, and if international 21 students are perceived to weaken their entitlements and interests, they would be regarded as competitors or even threat; finally, international students are also regarded by some as "charity", since the West believes that offering educational resources and opportunities to international students is an act of benevolence, which indicated the colonial pattern and nature of education in the West (Stein & Andreotti, 2016). In terms of the literature I reviewed, it is notable that the definition of internationalization and how internationalization should be implemented are contested. Although under globalization and internationalization, more international students are recruited by Western higher education institutions, racialized students, as well as Indigenous students, are still facing issues such as racism and discrimination in a colonial and White dominant society. Influenced by neoliberalism, academic capitalism as well as internationalization, higher education institutions are working on branding to represent their institutional reputation and privilege to attract more students and funding. At the same time, diversity work has also become a major job that needs to be done to create a more equitable, inclusive and diverse community for everyone to work and study there. 2.5 Marketization of Higher Education In the age of globalization and the operations of many international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, many aspects that have never been considered in the culture of the market are commodified in the "knowledge-based" industries, for instance, higher education (Kwong, 2000; Bertelson, 1998). As such, Kwong (2000) argued that education is a private good because it serves the reproduction of people who possess good educational backgrounds. Based on the 22 debates of education as a private or public good, the discourse marketization was framed. In terms of Kwong (2020), Marketization in education refers to the adoption of free-market practices in running schools. These include the business practices of cutting production costs, abandoning goods not in demand, producing only popular products, and advertising products to increase sales and the profit margin (p. 89). This is a general definition of marketization in education, and it resonates with the practices in the field of higher education. Verger, Steiner-Khamsi, and Lubienski (2017) suggested that the evidence of marketization in higher education including the increase of corporate universities, and other for-profit services provided by universities. Askehave (2007) noted that “higher education orientation towards the corporate sector has also led to an increase in the number of universities associating themselves with the practices and values of entrepreneurship” (p. 724). Furedi (2010) detailed that under the transformation of marketization, more university administrators are recruited from non-academic sectors who are acquainted with management techniques, and students are regarded by universities as customers. Furedi (2010) noted that many advocates of marketization of higher education believe the process of marketization would transform higher education to become more flexible and efficient, and can better satisfy the demands of the society, the economy, students and their parents, while by seeing students as customers would arguably have a negative impact on academic freedom and students' learning owing to the model of the service provider and customer relations. In terms of the debates, Kwong (2020) also maintained that although the education that universities provided might be improved due to the competition, students from lower social-economic or disadvantaged ethnic backgrounds would have fewer opportunities to attend prestigious institutions. According to 23 Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion (2009), students who are treated as customers in marketized universities in general, care more about getting degrees and well-paid jobs rather than self-development. They also noted that industry relevant skills are significantly focused by many market-oriented higher education sectors and raised concerns that the trend of marketization and the expansion of vocational higher education system would erode the intellectual complexity of those subjects that are not in demand in the market (e.g. humanities and social sciences) while those desired by the market (e.g. STEM, business, medicine) would have more networks with industries (Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion, 2009). 2.6 Branding in Higher Education Branding work has become one of the most important strategies for many higher education institutions to survive and to be competitive in a marketized context of higher education. In this section, I will review articles discussing branding and marketing in higher education sectors. According to Dholakia and Acciardo (2014), although higher education has existed for a long time, marketing in higher education especially in public universities is relatively recent. The concept of branding is often used in the business field, but it has gained increasing attention in higher education (Wæraas & Solbakk, 2008). According to Stensaker (2007), higher education branding is triggered by increased national and international competition. In the contexts of higher education, “a brand is a name, an image, a compelling description of an organization that captures the essence of the value that your college provides” (Frederick, Austin & Draper, 2000, p. 55, as cited in Judson, Aurand, Gorchels & Gordon, 2008). The primary function of branding is to differentiate and communicate competitive advantage, and branding is now playing a 24 prominent role in the higher education market (Judson et al., 2008; Dholakia & Acciardo, 2014). Similarly, Chapleo (2011) defined “branding was conceived as a means to establish a products’ name and to convey the legitimacy, prestige and stability of the manufacturer” (p. 413). Much of the literature I reviewed focused on branding in higher education as fierce and essential (Bock, Poole & Joseph, 2014; Judson et al., 2008; Wæraas & Solbakk, 2008;). For instance, many higher education institutions believe that through branding work, universities would have a better capacity for recruiting outstanding faculty members, attracting and retaining students, gaining more research funds and generous donations (Belanger et al., 2002). Although Chapleo (2011) noted that higher education branding might be controversial and has received some scrutiny from academics, he did not give critiques to higher education branding, rather, he argued it is important to measure the effectiveness of the branding work in higher education sectors. Jevons (2006) also suggested the importance of measuring the efficiency or the outcomes of the investments of branding, because branding can go wrong with unclear purpose and identity, and “universities should develop meaningfully differentiated brands to communicate their strengths” (p. 466). Stensaker (2007) noted that branding is an important process for higher education institutions to demonstrate their institutional identity through their external image. Stensaker (2007) mentioned some benefits of branding for higher education institutions. Branding efforts such as ranking can help institutions attract students from high-income families to study outside of their home states; branding work might help “combine neutral information with information intended to create emotional ties with various stakeholders” (p. 8); branding can be a strategy to facilitate institutions to cooperate and instigate internal change within an institution; branding may also help universities reflect on their identities, values and purposes of being an education sector in the society. 25 2.6.1 Branding Strategies Much has been written on higher education branding strategies. Bock et al. (2014) employed the theory of segmentation to analyze the higher education market and different students' needs and noted that students can be segmented and universities might use segmentation strategy to help to brand and thus recruit more students. For other branding methods, Ng (2014) argued that university branding is connected with specific values such as freedom and empowerment that are associated with the concept of the free market, and the brand indicates that the education that those universities provide would offer students the lifestyle they desire and could fulfill their needs. Ng (2014) also pointed out that images are becoming more important in branding and symbolic branding has become a trend to substitute documentary branding. Thus more visual elements such as photographic images are used in higher education branding to create conceptual values to shape people’s attitudes and adjust the current neoliberal knowledge-based industry. Clark, Fine, and Scheuer (2017) argued that in light of the high level of familiarity and usage among this age, social media was especially relevant when considering how to communicate with students. Their research recommends universities to invest resources in social media communication if they intend to establish high-quality relationships with stakeholders, especially students, and University social media marketers should strive to encourage students on various social media platforms since their results suggest these relationships could lead to potential benefits for the university and its stakeholders. Chapleo et al. (2011) examined university online branding, university websites in particular, and suggested that "In a time of increasing competition among universities, online branding needs to be given greater consideration” (p. 41). Their research also indicated that 26 universities should not merely promote their excellence of teaching and research, but innovation and international projection have become key elements for universities to promote. To stand out, universities also need to consider promoting their emotional values such as universities' environment and social responsibility, and for maintaining a long-term credible brand, their online brand positioning should be consistent with the reality (Chapleo et al., 2011). Not only Chapleo et al., Blanco and Metcalfe (2020) also noted the importance of using electronic media to attract students and engage alumni and donors. Besides, Chapleo (2015) pointed out that Branding through groupings has become valuable, for instance, "the Russell Group" in the U.K. is represented as world-class universities. Stensaker (2007) believes that branding is a process in which higher education institutions attempt to reimagine themselves as organizations. For Stensaker, universities need to maintain their organizational identity and inherent characteristics, even though they are continually changing. As such, branding should be more focused on innovation rather than imitation. Besides, similar to Belanger et al. (2002), who argued the importance of involving students and stakeholders in the development of an institutional image. Stensaker (2007) also claimed the significance of internal branding, as he argued that staff and students are the best marketers because they can be the central links to expose their institutions to others outside the universities. 2.6.2 Critiques on Branding Although much has been written on the importance and strategies of branding in higher education, less has been written on higher education branding from a critical perspective. Stensaker (2007) did not provide critiques to higher education branding, but he suggested some dangers of branding from a business lens. Specifically, investments in higher education branding 27 are at high risk because those investments would probably have little influence on students' choice of which universities to attend; there are risks that the reality perceived might be different from the images in the branding, and trust can be easily destroyed by that once students are regarded as customers; through branding work, some students will be attracted by a strong brand, and universities might want such selectivity, but some students might no longer be interested; besides, universities may see more what their competitors do than what students, parents or other players see as useful, and thus, universities are going to become more similar instead of showing their uniqueness through branding (Stensaker, 2007). Some have argued that brand does not equal the reputation of a university. For instance, Chapleo (2011) in his research found that many universities view brand however unlike reputation, and noted that branding is much easier for practitioners to construct while reputation might be derived from historical legacy and thus more difficult to manage (Chapleo, 2011; Chapleo, 2015). Similarly, Temple (2006) also argued that the brand of an institution getting an is arguably an illusion, and branding a university does not equal to make real changes such as achieving better teaching, research, physical infrastructure, and well-organized management of the university. Temple (2011) further argued that branding should be distinct from branding work. Specifically, branding is what people perceive about an institution as a consequence of what it is and what its employees and students have done through the years, while branding work can come from outside and make a small change in certain situations, but typically does not affect serious matters (Temple, 2011). For my study, “logo design” is seen as a part of the branding work, and might be attractive to students in a target market, but in terms of Temple, the branding work on updating logos or coat of arms alone would have no significant impact on good management and a well-nurtured academic culture. 28 Advertising global university rankings have often been used in higher education branding work. Stack (2013) suggested that the media defined excellence in higher education through global university rankings. Universities that advertising rankings to define themselves in a competitive educational marketplace would reinforce “narratives of long-standing hierarchies within universities” (Stack, 2013, p. 578) and could reproduce the assumption that “education excellence [is] primarily Western and for economic gain” (Stack, 2013, p 579). Similarly, Estera and Shahjahan (2019) argued that some university ranking websites that used visual images had led to normalizing “white and male bodies as universal, neutral and desirable” in higher education (p. 942). Thus, emphasizing rankings as a way to brand a university is not just informing people about the quality and excellence of the institution, but would further reproduce oppressive racialized ideologies (Estera & Shahjahan, 2019). Blanco and Metcalfe (2020) claimed the importance of critically examining the implications of higher education branding through online communication practices. Blanco and Metcalfe (2020) noted that higher education scholars and practitioners are often asked to underline the strengths of the programs and organizations to attract qualified applicants. As such, it is recommended for them to enhance the branding and communication campaigns that their organizations carry out, even though they might disagree with the messages and strategies. Blanco and Metcalfe (2020) acknowledged that institutional websites highlight factors like rankings and extramural research support while some institutional accreditation alongside academic values such as teaching and community engagement fail to communicate in the branding process. As such, they encourage institutional websites to communicate further balances of university operations, underline teaching and community participation and individual programs or departments to use their websites as alternatives to promote their teaching, 29 community engagement and other uncommercial values. 2.7 Racism and Anti-racism in Higher Education Systemic racism is rooted in almost all higher education institutions in the West. Particularly in many higher education institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. given most of the globally highly ranked universities are located there and the highest-ranking universities are usually Whiter (Stack, 2016). Although many of these White institutions are working on addressing racial inequality, the approaches they employed are often non-performative, in other words, commitment of addressing racism were made but not followed by institutional changes, and thus could hardly challenge the status quo of White dominance in Western universities (Ahmed 2006; Henry, Dua, Kobayashi, James, Li, Ramos and Smith, 2007; Lee & Rice, 2007; Mirza, 2018). Institutional racism is deeply rooted into the foundations of many Western universities. In the U.K., according to Mirza (2018), Black and Minority Ethnic students are less likely to be admitted to "Russell Group" universities, be awarded a good honors degree, and find good jobs after graduation (Bhopal, 2018; Mirza, 2018). In addition to British students of color, international students of color, faculty and staff of color, and Indigenous people have also reported racism and discriminations in other Western countries such as the U.S. and Canada. Lee and Rice (2007) studied racism in U.S. universities through international students' experience using the conceptual framework of neo-racism. Instead of race, neo-racism noted by Lee and Rice (2007) "emphasizes cultural differences as a basis of discrimination that appeals to popular notions of cultural preservation" (p. 383). Lee and Rice (2007) found that White international students and those of color encountered different experiences studying in the U.S., specifically, international students of color reported racism and discriminations but White 30 students rarely reported negative experiences regarding race or culture. International students of color in the U.S. universities often feel ignored in classes or excluded by classmates; their confidence would hurt by some professors who are impatient with less fluent English speakers or those who speak English with an accent; they are also excluded from employment because of certain restrictions and racism in employment (Lee & Rice, 2007). Henry et al. (2017) studied racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian universities and suggested that although Canada has become a more diverse country and the population of Indigenous people has also increased significantly, racialized and Indigenous people are still underrepresented in many Canadian higher education institutions, faculty and leadership in Canadian universities “remain overwhelmingly white and primarily male” (p. 302). Henry et al. (2017) noted that universities that normally are perceived as White and male-dominated universities are only making insignificant efforts on transforming their universities into more equitable and inclusive places for racialized and Indigenous faculty. As a result “silence about race and racial issues remains the norm and does nothing to address the reality that race and racism have shaped and continue to shape the experiences, opportunities, and perceptions of racialized and Indigenous scholars” (Henry et al., 2017, p. 312). Thus, racialized and Indigenous faculty and students are still underrepresented and will continue to be marginalized in higher education if challenges of creating an inclusive and welcoming environment cannot be addressed properly. Many universities acknowledge that systemic racism exists in their institutions, and many of them also actively respond to racism and inequalities, for instance, putting forward anti-racism initiatives (Henry et al., 2017). Henty et al. (2017) found that there is "a broad range of mechanisms that addressed harassment, discrimination, and inequalities to some extent, but all 31 were assessed as ineffective in addressing racism" (p. 308). Ahmed (2006) describes how often these initiatives become non-performative because those commitments are often not followed by other actions to implement what has been said. Pilkington (2013) noted that universities in England and Wales made progress in addressing race equality by admitting and hiring more students and staff from minority ethnic groups, while both of them continue to experience disadvantages and "racial inequality continues not to be a high priority issue for senior managers and academic leaders" (p. 243). In addition to universities' initiatives, various campaigns, particularly student activism was also launched to challenge Whiteness and racism around the world such as "Why is my Curriculum white" in the U.K., "Rhodes Must Fall" campaign in South Africa (Bhopal, 2018). 2.8 Diversity Work in Higher Education Talbot (2003) defines "diversity [as] a structure that includes the tangible presence of individuals representing a variety of different attributes and characteristics, including culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other physical and social variables" (p. 426). While diversity is not equal to diversity work, and diversity excellence is not the same thing as equity and racial justice. In terms of Ahmed (2012), diversity work in higher education is the process of integrating or embedding the language of diversity into the ordinary work or daily routines of the universities. Promoting diversity excellence requires higher education institutions to recruit a diverse student body, resolve socioeconomic inequalities, accomplish their democratic mission, remain economically competitive, and effectively train their students for a globalized world (Hakkola & Ropers-Huilman, 2018). Frølich and Stensaker (2010) studied how some higher education institutions use student recruitment strategies to promote excellence and diversity. 32 They found that many universities believed that diversity could trigger excellence, which is in line with Mampaey, Schtemberg, Schijns, Huisman and Wæraas (2020)’s argument that student diversity can be used as brand value. Frølich and Stensaker (2010) also noted that although many European higher education institutions show significant creativity in trying to adapt to ideas of excellence and diversity, they still wish to maintain their characteristics and traditions. Frølich and Stensaker’s findings are also in line with the situation in North America. Sensoy & DiAngelo (2017) suggested that although racial diversity among students has increased, it has yet to happen on faculty and university leadership teams, and the majority of faculty members and leadership in the United States remains White. Both Canada and the U.S. respectively have Employment Equity Act and equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation required by federal law to ensure equity, nevertheless, there are still persistent barriers that prevent racial diversity among faculty in those White universities (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) employed an intersectional race analysis to examine the diversity in the hiring process in North American institutions, they argued that it is difficult to challenge tradition and normative practices that function to exclude diverse faculty, but we must have the will to change, and if institutions are not actively working toward diversifying their institutions, they should not position their programs as "valuing diversity" or “encouraging diverse candidates” (p. 577). Ahmed (2012) also criticized that diversity work suggested by “diversity workers” were often received and interpreted differently by leadership in many higher education institutions, and thus, diversity work often became non-performative. Although institutional statements of commitment were made, those statements are not always followed up by substantive action, even when “diversity workers” have given certain guidance about what diversity might look like. Moreover, the logic of diversity can also be used as a technology to protect Whiteness in higher education 33 institutions since diversity can be more easily incorporated by the institutions and it does not necessarily have a threat to or require the institutions to change the current organizational values (Ahmed, 2012). In this literature review, I gave an overview of the environment in which higher education institutions are functioning, particularly those universities in the West. Discourses of neoliberalism and academic capitalism that moved higher education institutions to a more market-oriented field triggered many higher education institutions to compete with one another. Therefore, discourses of internationalization and marketization have become increasingly important for higher education to generate more revenue. Branding thus becomes significant in the work of internationalization and marketization to attract both domestic and international students to attend their institutions as well as other research funding and revenues. Institutional logo is a place that universities can work on rebranding, and indeed many universities have already updated their logos. However, less has been written on higher education rebranding through the lens of institutional logos and it is important to study this topic because many universities have updated their logos and some even invested a huge amount of their budget on the logos. Thus, investigating the rationales for some higher education leaders' decisions of rebranding the institutions through logos can widen the understanding of some unpacked goals or values of higher education institutions. For my study, I focus on two universities that updated their institutional logos for the reason they stated to update their institutional values such as anti-racism, diversity and inclusion. 34 Chapter 3: Methodology In this chapter, I detailed the methodology that I drew on to answer my research questions that are identified in Chapter 1. Specifically, I explained how I drew on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to study Harvard Law School and Imperial College London’s explanations on the updates of their institutional logos, and how CDA is an appropriate methodology to be used for analyzing the discursive tensions concerning logo changes at two universities. I outlined my research tradition as a critical researcher, the concept of discourse, an overview of Critical Discourse Analysis, data selection, and the limitations of this study in this chapter. 3.1 Research Traditions I acknowledge that my worldview is under the critical research paradigm. According to Guba and Lincoln (2005), critical researchers hold an ontology of historical realism, which argued that “virtual reality shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender value crystallized over time” (p. 168). Critical scholars suggested that “truths can be revealed by exploring the existing political conditions and contradictions and the hidden agendas and benefits of the current social order” and critical scholars “stress the importance of building awareness of multiple realities and allowing diverse voices to come to the fore”(Egbert & Sanden, 2019, p. 35). As for epistemology, as a critical scholar, I hold a subjectivist epistemology and I am specifically interested in oppression and the lived experience of people who are historically underrepresented in the society in which they live and work (Egbert & Sanden, 2019). In terms of Guba and Lincoln’s (2005) interpretation, I look at the world associated with its social, political, and historical contexts and see how knowledge is received and valued as the result of 35 power, privilege, and hegemony. In other words, I look at knowledge as the result of the unequal power relations as well as social, political, and cultural struggles. In this specific study, I looked at universities updating their institutional logos as a way to protect the unequal power relations. Sipe and Constable (1996) also suggested that knowledge is subjective, political, and constructed based on power, and thus truth is not just many but also constituted by social-political power. Critical researchers see the world as constructed by struggles and regard discourse as incorporated and regulated by rhetorical and political purposes (Sipe & Constable, 1996). Thus discourse is arguably used to maintain and interrupt the status quo, reproduce and challenge the enduring unequal social order, and critical researchers act as social activists to advocate for marginal groups and against unjust power strictures (Sipe & Constable, 1996). As such, my thesis illustrates the phenomenon of updating institutional logos in higher education institutions as the result of social, political and cultural inequalities and imbalances of power relations in line with the critical research paradigm. The methodology I chose for this study was derived from my critical research paradigm. In light of a critical worldview, I drew on qualitative research methodology, Critical Discourse Analysis, to understand how higher education institutions leadership explained the updates of their institutional logos and tensions around those changes among people with different standpoints. According to Denzin and Lincoln (2018), “qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them" (p. 43). I employed qualitative research methods to interpret the phenomenon of updating institutional logos and make sense of the meanings that people in the universities brought to their logos. I also looked at people's debates and tensions around the 36 decisions of updating the institutional logos. Specifically, I look at the unequal power relations embedded in the debates such as whose opinions were present, and whose voices were not taken up. In the following sections, I detailed an overview of the concept of discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis and then justified CDA as an appropriate methodology to be drawn on for this study. 3.2 The Concept of Discourse The concept of discourse is fuzzy, and the term “discourse” is used differently by different researchers and in different academic cultures (Van Dijk, 1997; Wodak, 2011). Discourse is usually known as “a form of language use, public speeches or more generally to spoken language or ways of speaking” (Van Dijk, 1997, p.1). However, this is just a common-sense definition of discourse. For Wodak (2008), discourse is “anything from a historical monument, a lieu de memoire, a policy, a political strategy, narratives in a restricted or broad sense of the term, text, talk, a speech, topic-related conversations, to language per se” (p. 3). Van Dijk (1997) mentioned that although discourse analysts agreed that discourse is a form of language use, it is necessary to have more theoretical descriptions of discourse, specifically, to “include some other essential components in the concept, namely, who uses language, how, why, and when” (p.2). In addition to language use as one of the dimensions of discourse, communication of beliefs or cognition (people use language to communicate ideas or beliefs) and verbal interaction (an interactional aspect of discourse) are another two main dimensions of discourse, and verbal interaction in discourse is particularly often used in social sciences research to analyze the interactions in social situations (Van Dijk, 1997). 37 Foucault sees languages as a form of social practice (Van Leeuwen, 2008), and this thought influenced other critical discourse scholars. For instance, Fairclough and Wodak (1997) argued that discourse gives rise to important issues of power and discursive practices can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations in terms of how discourse represents things and positions people. Besides, Fairclough (2013) suggested that discourse cannot be defined independently, but the complex relations that discourse brings into make meaning of social life. Similarly, Rogers (2011) also suggested that discourse is not just an artifact “but a set of consumptive, productive, distributive, and reproductive processes that exist in relation to the social world”, and “Discourses are both the object of the study and the theoretical device for meaning-making" (p. 6). For my study, I see discourse as not just a set of texts, rather, discourse is used as meaning-making and a form of social practice (Rogers, 2011). Besides, power relations can be seen in the discourse and can shape the way people think and act. I thus looked at discourse in its larger social and political context where unequal power relations and positions are embedded. 3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis Wodak (2011) suggested that “CDA has never been and has never attempted to be or to provide one single or specific theory. Neither is one specific methodology characteristic of research in CDA” (p. 3). “Critical discourse analysis is a problem-oriented and transdisciplinary set of theories and methods that have been widely used in educational research” (Rogers, 2011, p. 1). Rogers et al. in 2005 explained that CDA is an attempt to merge social theory and discourse analysis to define, analyze and explain the forms in which discourse is built, expressed and represented by the social environment (p. 366), and they pointed out that thought mediated 38 historically constituted power relations, facts are not neutral but always rooted in contexts, and language is fundamental to subjectivity and subjugation. Van Dijk (2011) looked at CDA as interested in the "semiotic, dimension of power, injustice, abuse, and political economy or cultural change in society" (p. 2). As such, researchers who use CDA argue that it is a powerful methodology to analyze social injustice because CDA makes an attempt to make explicit power relationships that are concealed in discourse and draw critical results from the discourse (Meyer, 2002). Fairclough and Wodak (1997) specified some features of discourse. First, CDA sees discourse as a type of social practice implying a dialectical interaction between a given discursive occurrence and situations, institutions, and social structures. Second, discourse is both socially constitutive and socially conditioned. It constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and social identities and relationships between people and groups of people. It is constitutive both in that it helps sustain and reproduce the social status quo and in that it contributes to its transformation. Third, since discourse is socially consequential, it creates important power issues. Discursive practices can have major ideological effects, as they can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations (p. 258). Power, accordingly, is a significant element in CDA. Drawing on Foucault, Wodak and Meyer (2016) suggested that “Discourses are not only coherent and rational bodies of speech and writing, but play an important role as discursive formations in conveying and implementing power and domination in society” (p. 11). Therefore, in my study, I will critically analyze “hidden, opaque, and visible structures of dominance, discrimination, power and control” (p. 12) in the discourses that I collected. As for the functions of CDA in qualitative research, Rogers (2008) suggested that CDA can be used as “an interdisciplinary set of theoretical and analytic tools” (p. 53) in a range of 39 educational studies in relation to the relationships among texts, discourse practices, and social practices. CDA researchers primarily concentrate on how language mediates power-privilege interactions in social engagement, institutions, and knowledge bodies, and their focus is on trying to uncover domination by power and unjust relationships and reforming injustice situations (Rogers, 2008). Beyond that, Rogers (2008) also noted that “critical analysis of discourse is an analysis not only of what is said, but of what is left out; not only what is present in the text, but what is absent” (p. 15). As such, I critically looked at discourses from the perspectives of what has been said, what has not been said and what can be inferred in this study. The topic of this study is related to anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, thus, I drew on CDA to explore the unequal power relations, structures of dominance, discriminations between university leaders, faculty and students who might hold different opinions regarding the logo changes. Specifically, I analyzed what is being said, what is not being said and what can be inferred in the discourse. Besides, I used CDA as a tool to unpack the resistance from people inside and outside of the institutions who wanted to challenge or maintain social inequalities, to investigate whether these university leaders were making substantive changes to address racial issues through updating institutional logos, and therefore, to advocate for people who are historically underrepresented in the society and are suffering from social injustice. CDA is appropriate for my study because it enabled me to unpack the unequal power relationships embedded in the discourses. For my research, I looked at how university leaders at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London explained their rationales for updating their university logos. Their announcement and other related documents are texts that can be analyzed as discourses. By analyzing the language that university leaders used through CDA, it allowed me to unpack how university leaders position themselves, their universities, and how they 40 acknowledged their institutions’ colonial and racist past and present. I also looked at debates around the changes of logos, and those debates are also discourses where I investigated unequal power relations, bias and discriminations among people holding different viewpoints. 3.4 The Present Study This thesis aims to answer research questions around higher education institutions’ decisions to update their institutional logos as a symbolic politics or public relations strategy to respond to the pressure of addressing systemic racism and promoting diversity and inclusion excellence. My overarching questions are restated below: 1. How did Harvard Law School and Imperial College London explain their reasons for rebranding their institutional logos? 2. How was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, and to what extent do university leadership and students acknowledge their institutions’ colonial and racist past and present? 3. What were the debates and tensions around the updates of institutional logos at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London? 3.5 Data Collection and Selection In this section, I describe how I collected and selected data online for my further analysis and answering my research questions. For this study, the method of collecting data is secondary data collection. I only chose to collect and analyze publicly available data, and thus I primarily collected data from institutional web pages, news articles that reported events around the logo changes of Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, and social media pages of student 41 movement groups. I listed all the documents that I collected in a table containing the titles, types, dates, authors, and of those documents. 3.5.1 Harvard Law School Data For Harvard Law School, I went to HLS’s official website and searched keywords of “logo”, “shield”, “seal”, “Royall”. As a result, there were some articles related to HLS’s removal of its shield from different sources such as student media, university media, other newspapers and documents came up. I chose data that can be used to analyze and answer my research questions. To answer the question of how did HLS explain the removal of the shield, I firstly chose to look at how news articles reported the event to have a sense of the overarching story, and to take some quotes that can be further analyzed. Although many newspapers have reported the removal of HLS’s shield, many contents were repetitive. So I only chose those news articles that contain unique and detailed information about the process of removing the shield, and quotes from people holds different opinions. Therefore, I chose news article “The Harvard Law shield tied to slavery is already disappearing, after corporation vote” (Svrluga, 2016, March 15) reported by The Washington Post. I also collected three important documents from HLS’s official media, a publication of HLS’s Office of Communications, Harvard Law Today to look at how the decision was made in detail and the language of anti-racism and diversity was used in these documents. Therefore, I collected “Recommendation to the President and Fellows of Harvard College on the Shield Approved for the Law School”, a report by the shield committee that detailed the whole process of the decision made by the shield committee that recommended to remove the shield, and a “Memorandum” that Dean Minow and Professor of Law, Helen Chu sent to the President and the Harvard Corporation, and a letter that President Faust and Senior 42 Fellow William F. Lee replied to Dean Minow. These documents were important to analyze in order to look at how leadership at Harvard Law School frame the issue of the shield and to look at how leadership at Harvard acknowledged the Law School’s colonial past and present. To answer the research question of what were the debates and tensions around the removal of the HLS shield, I collected quotes from news articles and documents listed above that expressed their opinions of the removal of the shield. Besides, by searching keywords of “shield” in HLS’ web page, I found an important article named “A Different View” by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed who illustrated her opinion on why keeping the shield is necessary. More data about the debates were found from social media pages and websites launched by student movement groups. I went to the student activism page, Reclaim Harvard Law, and collected data related to the demands for change at HLS, particularly the demand of removing the shield. I also went to Facebook and Twitter pages launched by student activists, Royall Must Fall, and collected their posts. I reviewed all posts and collected posts that demonstrate student activists’ opinions on the shield and anti-racism. By looking at these data, I would be able to see how people who hold different opinions framed the same issue on the Law School shield and look at whether their opinions and suggestions were reflected in the decision making. Title Type Authors Date The Harvard Law shield tied to slavery is already disappearing, after corporation vote News article Susan Svrluga from The Washington Post March 5, 2016 Recommendation to the President and Fellows of Harvard College on the Shield Approved for the Law School Committee report Shield committee March 3, 2016 Memorandum Memorandum Martha Minor and Helen Chu March 3, 2016 43 N/A Letter President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow William F. Lee November 14, 2016 A Different View Letter Annett Gordon-Reed 2016 Reclaim Harvard Law School Activists’ Website Harvard Law School Student December 4, 2015 #RoyallMustFall Twitter hashtag Royall Must Fall N/A Royall Must Fall Facebook Page Royall Must Fall N/A Table 1: Data of Harvard Law School 3.5.2 Imperial College London Data For Imperial College London, similar to the data collection process of HLS, I went to Google to search for some news that reported the change of ICL’s coat of arms to learn the overarching story. I searched keywords of “Imperial”, “ICL”, “coat of arms” and “Latin motto” to find news articles reporting about ICL’s updated coat of arms. As a result, I found a news article titled “Imperial College London ditches Latin motto from logo over British Empire links” (Somerville, 2020, June 16) by a local newspaper in London, The Evening Standard, which detailed the process of removing the Latin motto from the ICL coat of arms, and there are some quotes from ICL leaders that can be used for further analysis. To answer my research question of how ICL leadership explained its change of coat of arms and how the language of anti-racism and diversity was used by ICL leaders, I collected data of official documents and announcements from ICL leaders on the ICL official web page. First of all, there is a particular page that talked about the ICL coat of arms – “The College crest”. 44 This page specifically introduces the history of the ICL coat of arms and the recent update in 2020. I also went to the ICL president’s website to find announcements made by ICL leaders. I collect an announcement by President Alice P. Gast in June 12, 2020 named “Tackling racial inequality and injustice update to students”, and in this announcement, I also found link to another letter sent by the Provost Ian Walmsley to the ICL community discussing Black Lives Matter movement and the decision of removing the Latin motto. Also, by searching campus news, an article titled “New measures to tackle racial inequality, as Imperial pledges to ‘do better’” (Evanson & Scheuber, 2020, June 5) was collected, and there are quotes and new measurements discussed and announced by ICL leaders in this article. These announcements and documents are data that can be seen as discourse for me to analyze and shed light on reasons that ICL leaders chose to update the coat of arms, and how leaders at ICL frame the issue regarding the change of the coat of arms. Looking at the use of language in anti-racism and diversity, as well as those new measurements would be helpful to answer the question of to what extent did ICL leaders acknowledge the College’s colonial past and present. As for debates around the update of the ICL coat of arms, based on my search, there were two petitions appeared on the change.org website written by students at ICL discussing their stand of disagreeing updating the coat of arms, one named “Imperial Crest - Reinstate, Reinterpret and Represent” (Imperial student, 2020a), and other named “Keep the Imperial College motto” (Imperial student, 2020b). These petitions could help to analyze some ICL students’ understanding of racism, diversity and Black Lives Matter movements, and how the thoughts of perpetuating inequality and reproducing racism embedded in their language. In order to learn more details about ICL’s coat of arms, beyond texts, I also found the visual data of the Royal coat of arms of the U.K., and I comparing the Royal coat of arms with 45 the ICL coat of arms to see the elements that have certain connections between these two coat of arms. Title Type Authors Date The College crest Imperial College website N/A 2020 Tackling racial inequality and injustice update to students Announcement President Alice P. Gast June 12, 2020 N/A Letter Provost Ian Walmsley New measures to tackle racial inequality, as Imperial pledges to ‘do better’ News article: ICL Campus news Evanson and Scheuber June 5, 2020 Imperial Crest - Reinstate, Reinterpret and Represent Petition on change.org Some ICL students 2020 Reclaim Harvard Law School Petition on change.org Some ICL students 2020 Royal Coat of Arms Visual data N/A N/A Table 2: Data of Imperial College London 3.6 Data Analysis In this section, I illustrated the process of data analysis. I firstly looked at who spoke in the discourse and whose voice was absent. In particular, I compared how leadership, students, and others at HLS and ICL differently framed the issues around the changes of their institutional logos. Through analyzing the data I collected, I particularly looked at whose voice and roles were predominant in the decision making process, 46 and whose opinions were not taken up. I also looked at whether leadership at HLS and ICL quoted from activists and underrepresented people in their language. Second, I analyzed how the discourses were presented, specifically, I looked at the use of language in the discourse. By analyzing the use of language, I would know how people positioned themselves and others in the discourse. Specifically, I looked at how leadership and some students at HLS and ICL positioned their institutions in the global higher education contexts; positioned historically marginalized and underrepresented people in their institutions and in the society; and positioned themselves in the stratified higher education landscape. Last but not least, I analyzed what is in the discourse and what is not, and why some content was mentioned in the discourse while some were not. Specifically, I looked at what is being absent from the perspectives of marginalized populations and those advocating for institutional change. Analyzing what and why certain content was presented and absent in the discourse would shed light on the enduring unequal relations in social practice, in my case, updating university logos as well as advocating for or opposing the logo changes. 3.7 Limitations of the Study I acknowledge that there are certain limitations in my research. First of all, the scope of this study is relatively small. Other universities such as the University of Warwick, the University of Limerick, and the City University of Hong Kong, might have different rationales for changing their logos. Therefore, readers and other researchers can make their own conclusions, connections and applications from this study to different institutions or contexts. Further, CDA itself has limitations, and CDA also brought critiques. For instance, when interpreting data, CDA researchers might have their own critical perspectives to emphasize what 47 they intend to say (Rogers, 2004). In other words, when using CDA, researchers would bring their own perspectives into the analysis and interpretation of qualitative data (Pauwels, 2012). For me, I acknowledge that as a Chinese student studying in North America, my positionality in different racial and colonial hierarchies in China and Western societies would produce particular geopolitics and biopolitics of knowledge. Thus, I would certainly bring my own critical perspectives of challenging racial inequalities in Western institutions when interpreting discourses. Analyzing documents and other existing data that are available online could shed some light on some implications for universities to update their institutional logos, and could to some extent understand different people's viewpoints around the updates. However, the limitation of the online data is that it would be hard for me to know people’s positionalities through analyzing online documents without knowing their other backgrounds such as gender, race, and social class. 48 Chapter 4: Theoretical Framework I draw on some theoretical frameworks to frame and deepen my analysis based on Critical Discourse Analysis. I particularly employ the work of Sara Ahmed, Derrick Bell, and Pierre Bourdieu to frame my analysis of the cases of Harvard Law School and Imperial College London. Specifically, the university leaders’ decisions of removing or changing their institutional logos, and the tensions and debates around the decisions. I draw on Ahmed’s (2012) work on the non-performativity of anti-racism and diversity work to unpack some possible rationales for universities to choose to update their institutional logos, particularly as an approach to respond to the pressure from anti-racist activism, as well some possible risks that these decisions might bring to the institution. I also look at how non-performativity can be seen in the decision-making process in rebranding. I also draw on Bell (1980)’s theory of interest convergence, one tenet of Critical Race Theory, to analyze whether the decision of updating university logos at HLS and ICL is simply for addressing inequality and promoting diversity and inclusion excellence for historically underrepresented groups in higher education, or more importantly, for the interest of predominant group in higher education and reinforce the status quo of inequalities. For Bourdieu, I use culture capital to analyze why some students from ICL did not agree with the decision to update the coat of arms. Particularly, I look at how some ICL students perceive the meaning of the coat of arms, and analyze the coat of arms as part of the cultural capital that would be granted to students as an academic qualification. I detail these theoretical frameworks in the following sections and explain how these theories can be applied to frame the scope of my understanding and analysis in this study. 49 4.1 Non-performativity of Anti-Racism and Diversity Work In the book, On Being Included: Racism and diversity in institutional life, the author Sara Ahmed (2012) systematically studied diversity work in higher education institutions, in which Ahmed employed the notion of non-performativity to analyze higher education institutions’ work on anti-racism and diversity. Ahmed (2012) noted that although many higher education practitioners are employed to work on diversifying the institutions and addressing racism in their institutions, “diversity workers” are often resistant to their work. This type of resistance is described by Ahmed through the metaphor of brick wall because practitioners who are doing diversity work argue that the job that they are doing is coming up against institutions that do not move, solid, and tangible. In other words, anti-racism and diversity work in institutions has become a paradox that "on the one hand, the routine uses of the language of diversity by institutions and, on the other, the experience of many practitioners of an institutional resistance to diversity becoming routine" (p. 52). With these difficulties and considerations, “diversity workers” might seek to do more in practice but are barred from doing so and higher education leadership and administrators often say more about their commitment to anti-racism and diversity but not to implement what they have committed. Ahmed’s (2006; 2012) work on analyzing diversity is basically focused on documents ranging from institutional policy documents to speech acts, in which Ahmed concluded that "performative culture is institutional culture" (Ahmed, 2012, p. 84) and many commitments that institutions made are non-performative. Although writing documents and making commitments of addressing racism and promoting diversity made those institutions look good, there is often little institutional or political will and commitment to actually change institutions. In other words, these documents are useful because they constructed a commitment that the anti-racism 50 and diversity work is in progress, but covered the reality that nothing important has changed. Thus, much anti-racism and diversity work are non-performative activities and this type of non-performativity shows that there is a big gap between texts and social action in anti-racism and institutional diversity work (Ahmed, 2006, 2012). As Ahmed (2006) argued, "solutions to problems are the problems given new forms" (p. 143), working on diversity in a non-performative way can cause new problems in higher education institutions. First of all, "[diversity] can be a method of protecting whiteness" (p. 147), and "[institutional] whiteness can be reproduced through the logic of diversity" (p. 44), not only because racism would be regarded as an injury to Whiteness when it becomes an institutional injury, but diversity can be more easily incorporated by the institutions and it does not necessarily have a threat to or require the institutions to change the current organizational values. Second, recognizing the institutional nature of racism does not mean it is a solution, but rather, "the recognition of institutional racism can become a technology of reproduction of the racism of individuals'' (p. 46). Because the recognition of the institutional racism provided people with a comfortable cover, which cause the risks of disidentification, and individuals might not see themselves as involved in institutional racism, and this type of recognition is even converted into an expression of institutional and national pride which is ironically a distortion of the truth (Ahmed, 2016). In addition, Ahmed (2016) suggested that "diversity can also work as a branding exercise, a way of reimagining the organization as 'being diverse' through the inclusion of those who embody diversity", and as a happy sign to demonstrate that the institutions are "committed to equality and antiracism" (p. 153). Nonetheless, working on diversity as a branding strategy has also become an elite technology because diversity "can be more easily associated with commercial and professional success" and "[diversity] can be an of doing advantage, or 51 becoming more advantaged, rather than challenging disadvantage" (p. 78). Consultation plays an important role in anti-racism and diversity work, but it can also be used as a technology of inclusion (Ahmed, 2016, p. 93). Involving consultation shows the attitudes that the institutions embrace different voices from a variety of groups, and it can help legitimize the document while including “the others” in the process does not necessarily mean that their suggestions and comments will be included, rather, it is a technology for institutions to legitimize and authenticate their inclusion documents (Ahmed, 2016). In the cases I am going to analyze the power relations in the decision making process, particularly, the institutions at some point mentioned that they involve opinions from different backgrounds, but they would probably not indicate whose opinions were taken up and whose were not. For my study, I draw on Ahmed's work on non-performativity of higher education institutions' anti-racism and diversity work to guide and frame my analysis for the cases of Harvard Law School and Imperial College London. By looking at some university practitioners' work on addressing the racial issue and promoting diversity as non-performative efforts, it will be helpful to shed light on the reasons why some university leaders chose to update their university logos as a way to respond to internal and external anti-racism activism. In addition, changing the logo as a non-performative approach and a form of symbolic politics without implementing their commitment to racial equality can produce other types of problems such as protecting Whiteness and reproducing racism. I draw on non-performativity to look at how different voices and opinions had been engaged or missed, specifically, whose opinions were taken up and whose were not in the decision-making process, in terms of different positionalities. 52 4.2 Interest Convergence The theory of interest convergence is another theoretical framework that I will employ to strengthen and deepen my analysis. Interest convergence principle, as one of the tenets of Critical Race Theory, was firstly used by Derrick Bell (1980) in analyzing the Brown v. Board decision. Bell (1980) argued that the decision of integrating schools was not simply concerning the immorality of racial inequality but served the interest of White people due to global political and economic factors. In short, “this principle of ‘interest convergence’ provides: The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites” (Bell, 1980, p. 523). Interest convergence, as one of the tenets of Critical Race Theory, has been widely used in higher education research, particularly to analyze higher education institutions’ decision on diversity and inclusivity (Hiraldo, 2010). For my cases, it is appropriate to apply interest convergence to my analysis because the change of university logos of Harvard Law School and Imperial College London were, to some extent, associated with racial issues, diversity and inclusion work. I will translate the theory of interest convergence to be resonated to the HLS and ICL contexts. In other words, when applying interest convergence to HLS and ICL, I identify who are advocating and who are persons in positions of power. In terms of the theory of interest convergence, I particularly analyze whether the decisions of updating university logos at HLS and ICL were simply for addressing inequality and promoting diversity and inclusion excellence for historically underrepresented groups in higher education, or more importantly, for the interest of predominant group in higher education and reinforce the status quo of inequalities. Combining “non-performativity”, interest convergence can be used as a strong analytical lens to analyze the implications for university leaders to update institutional logos as well as other changes as 53 symbolic politics or public relations efforts. 4.3 Cultural Capital In order to interpret divergent reactions towards ICL’s update of coat of arms, I employ the concept, cultural capital, from Bourdieu. Cultural capital can be useful to frame my understanding of different people's perceptions of the institutional logos. Specifically, the institutionalized state of cultural capital, in other words, academic qualification, is the form of cultural capital that will be applied in my analysis. Capital, in terms of Bourdieu (1986), in general, as "accumulated labor", "in its objectified or embodied forms", is "a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in the identical or expanded form" (p. 15). Cultural capital can exist in the form of institutionalized state, which can be represented as academic qualifications. Academic qualification as "a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture" (p. 20). University logos represent institutions, and these logos display on many occasions in institutions. For instance, logos or coat of arms are often displayed on the degrees conferred to students, and students as the academic qualification holders would use the degree to exchange "monetary value" (p. 21) in the labor market after graduation. This exchange is a form of transferring the cultural capital to economic capital. By looking at how students perceive the logos in their language, I analyze whether students see the logos as part of their academic qualifications and represent their identity as elite students. 54 Chapter 5: Harvard Law School In this chapter, I analyzed the first case of this study – Harvard Law School, and its leaders’ decision to remove the shield. I first introduced the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the history of the Isaac Royall family as the background of the Royall Must Fall movement. Then I followed the data analysis process introduced in Chapter 3 to answer my three research questions: how did leaders at HLS explain the reasons for removing the shield? How was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process, and to what extent did HLS leaders acknowledge the Law School’s racist and colonial past and present? What were the debates around removing the shield? Finally, I discussed the implications of removing the HLS shield and people's debates drawing on the theoretical frameworks, non-performativity and interest convergence. 5.1 Background 5.1.1 Rhodes Must Fall Rhodes Must Fall is a movement led by students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa that started on March 9, 2015 (Bosch, 2017). The initial goal of this campaign is to call for the removal of the statue of a British colonialist, Cecil John Rhodes, on its main campus (Bosch, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Rhodes's imperial goal was to colonize entire Africa and make it a British colony, he has a famous saying, “I contend that we [British] are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race” (Rhodes, 1877). Nevertheless, until now Cecil Rhodes’s legacy still continues to remain in many higher education institutions. For instance, the Rhodes Scholarships, a prestigious and the oldest graduate scholarship established by the Rhodes Trust (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The campaign of 55 Rhodes Must Fall is arguably a decolonial movement that aimed to disrupt the glorification or respected accorded to Rhodes who was responsible for genocide, enslavement, invasion, colonization, and segregation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). During the Rhodes Must Fall movement, student activists actively used social media, and Twitter, in particular, to demonstrate their stance and voice and resist the normative memory of Rhodes. Although for decades, there were “calls for the university to remove the sculpture surfaced from time to time” (Schmahmann, 2016, p. 98), not until a month later from the Rhodes Must Fall movement, had the statue of Cecil Rhodes finally been removed (Bosch, 2017). 5.1.2 Isaac Royall Family Wilder (2013) noted in the book Ebony and Ivy that the establishment of the first five colleges in the British American colonies namely Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Codrington in Barbados, and New Jersey was based on the oppression of Black and Indigenous people. Those colleges were built for expanding the influence of white Christian people, and in this process they were complicit in the invasion and colonization of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of African peoples (Wilder, 2013). Isaac Royall as a merchant mariner utilized his maritime skills to work on slave trading, and established a sugar cane plantation in Antigua and thus entered the elite society (Wilder, 2013; "The Royalls", n.d.). Coquillette and Kimball (2015), described how the Royall family survived a massive slave rebellion that ended with “slaves burned at the stake, broken on the wheel, and gibbeted alive” (p. 75), and they left for Medford, Massachusetts in 1737 to escape more slave revolts. The Royalls went to Massachusetts with twenty-seven enslaved Black people and purchased the Ten Hill Farm, and more than sixty enslaved Black people worked on the farm thereafter (Wilder, 2013). In terms of 56 Royall's 1781 will, Isaac Royall Junior bequeathed two thousand acres to Harvard, and provided a fund for a law professor and a professor of anatomy and physics. Later on, Harvard Medical College and several scientific research institutions were established (Wilder, 2013; “The Royalls”, n.d.). Beyond the institutionalization of science and medicine, Harvard Law School was also founded in 1817 by the estate of Isaac Royall, and the first endowed chair of Harvard Law School was funded by the Royalls (Coquillette & Kimball, 2015). In 1936, Harvard Law School started to use the shield (Figure 1) with the three stacked wheat sheaves adopted from the Royall’s coat of arms (Coquillette and Kimball 2015; "History of Harvard Law School", n.d.). Figure 1: Harvard Law School Shield 5.2 Royall Must Fall For decades, students at Harvard Law School fought for anti-racism and against White supremacy (Wilder, 2013). Some students, staff and other members at Harvard Law School formed a movement called “Reclaim Harvard Law School” pushing for institutional change at Harvard Law School, and Royall Must Fall as one of the student activism groups specifically focus on the enslaved people and demanding for removing the HLS shield (“Reclaim Harvard 57 Law Demands”, 2015, December 4). In terms of Reclaim Harvard Law Demands (2015, December 4), three major demands were proposed: first, the Royall family shield must be removed; second, a permanent physical acknowledgement of Harvard Law School’s slavery should be created; and “Isaac Royall Chair” should be renamed or allocating the chair to a Critical Race Theory scholar. The first academic tension around the shield of Harvard Law School started in 2000 when Professor Daniel Coquillette’s work on the history of Harvard Law School disseminated the association between Harvard Law Schools’ shield and the Royalls’ coat of arms (Figure 2) (Mann, Bowers, Brown-Nagin, Halley, Karefa-Johnson, Katz, Moyn, Northington, Shen & Barker-Vormawor, 2016, March, 3). This important finding was disclosed in Coquillette’s book, On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century, published in 2015 by Harvard Press. Prior to Coquillette’s research, most people were not aware of the fact that the shield of Harvard Law School was adopted from the Royall family coat of arms (Gordon-Reed & Rittgers, 2016). Figure 2: Coat of Arms of the Royall Family 58 Similar to and inspired by the style of the Rhoades Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa (Duehren, A. M., 2015, November 2), Royall Must Fall movement that happened in 2015 was also a student-led movement, and the goal of this movement was to call for Harvard Law School to address the history of the establishment of Harvard Law School associating with the bequest from brutal slave owners, the Royall family (Johnson, A., Clayborne, A., & Cuddihy, S., 2015, November 20). Members of Royall Must Fall urged Harvard Law School to change the Law School’s shield adopted from the coat of arms of the Royall family (Duehren, 2015, November 2). Students who participated in this movement argued that Symbols are an expression of who we are as a community, and who we are today is inextricably linked to our history. Symbols that memorialize people like Royall sanitize our history of slavery. If the Law School does not confront its history, then it is contributing to a continuing culture of subjugation and oppression (Johnson et al., 2015, November 20). During this movement, members of Royall Must Fall used a variety of approaches to protests. For instance, students launched several pages on social media such as Twitter and Facebook to advocate for their appeals, they drafted letters calling for the Dean of the Law School, Martha L. Minow to remove the Royall family shield (Duehren, 2015, November 2). After months of the protests, the shield that had been used for 80 years was officially removed after the vote by Harvard Corporation (Svrluga, 2016, March 15). Harvard President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow William F. Lee also wrote a letter to the Dean Minow saying it was the right time to remove the shield and choose a new logo with Harvard Law Schools’ upcoming bicentennial in 2017 (Svrluga, 2016, March 15). On March 14, 2016, Royall Must Fall posted on Twitter 59 “Royall has fallen” to announce their “victory” of the movement (RoyallMustFall, 2016, March 14). 5.3 Analysis of Removing the Shield In this section, I primarily analyzed four documents to answer my first two research questions in the case of Harvard Law School: how did leaders at HLS explain the reasons for removing the shield? How was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process, and to what extent did HLS leaders acknowledge the Law School’s racist and colonial past and present? And these documents including committee report titled “Recommendation to the President and Fellows of Harvard College on the Shield Approved for the Law School” drafted by the Shield Committee chaired by Professor of Law, Bruce H. Mann, a “Memorandum” written by Dean Minow, and Morgan and Helen Chu; a letter sent by Dean Minow to the campus community; and a letter sent from President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow William F. Lee informing the approval of moving the shield. 5.3.1 The Creation of the Shield Committee At the very beginning of the Shield Committee Report, it introduced the background and purposes of the creation of the Shield Committee. The Shield Committee Report (2016) stated the background that “Students of the Law School, affiliating under the name Royall Must Fall, protested the use of the shield last fall. After a racially-charged incident in Wasserstein Hall on November 18, 2015, Dean Martha L. Minow, as part of her response, created this Committee” (p.1) and the purpose for creating this committee was “to study the shield and to recommend to the President and Fellows whether or not to retain it for use by the Law School” (p.1). Besides, 60 the Committee also acknowledged that the association between the HLS shield and the coat of arms of the Royall family was disclosed in 2000 in Professor Daniel R. Coquillette’s research on the history of HLS (Mann et al., 2016). The statement above indicated that Dean Minow was working on racial issues and listening to students’ demands as she created the Shield Committee to study the shield. Forming a Shield Committee indicated that Dean Minow attached great importance to the debate of whether HLS should continue to use the shield, and she needed to know different voices from the whole Law School community to make a considered decision. However, many explanations were missing in the statement as well. When taking a look at the time provided in the statement above, it uncovered the fact that it took at least 15 years for the HLS leaders to address issues around the controversial shield. The connection between the HLS shield and Royall's coat of arms was initially found in 2000, but the report neither mentioned HLS leaders’ perspectives regarding the shield nor did the report provide reasons that HLS leaders did not take any actions during the past 15 years. Racism is not new at Harvard, and if debates around the HLS shield were started more than a decade ago, what were the rationales for HLS leaders not to respond to this issue until 2015? The Shield Committee was not created until a series of racial issues happened at HLS, and explanations of the hesitation and delay for HLS leaders to respond to Royall Must Fall activists was missing in the Committee report. Ignoring the racial issues that were already raised by faculty and students but the delay of responses indicated HLS leadership’s hesitation of addressing racial inequality and challenging systemic racism and colonialism at HLS. In addition, although the committee report showed that HLS leaders were listening to students' voice, leaders at HLS did not take actions to respond to students' demands until protests took place and a "racially-charged incident in Wasserstein Hall” occurred on November 18, 2015 61 (Mann et al., 2016). Another important absent fact is that the committee report did not mention what exactly occurred in a “racially-charged incident”. In fact, on that day, portraits of Black faculty members in Wasserstein Hall were covered by black tapes, and this incident was explained by RoyallMustFall as violent retaliation against Black and anti-racism activism including the Royall Must Fall movement (Izadi, 2015, November 19; RoyallMustFall, 2015, November 19). This radical incident showed that racism is still a severe issue at Harvard, and anti-Black power and White supremacy on campus is resisting anti-racist activism and Black faculty members. Nevertheless, the response of stating vaguely instead of describing what exactly happened of the incident indicated that some members in the Shield Committee at some point did not fully acknowledge the colonial and racist present at HLS. Besides, refusing to acknowledge the racist and colonial present at Harvard but focusing on studying the logo shifted the attention to HLS’s colonial and racist past. 5.3.2 Members in the Shield Committee In order to know who was saying in the Committee report, I looked at who were the members and how the members were chosen in the Shield Committee. The Shield Committee was chaired by Bruce H. Mann, and in terms of the Committee report (2016), twelve people including the Chair were selected to join the Shield Committee, which were five professors, two alumni, three students and two staff members. Listening to all the members in the Shield Committee could show the public that the decision-making process was democratic and involved different opinions from people in the HLS community with a variety of roles. However, this committee report did not disclose the process of selecting committee members. What we know is 62 that Dean Minow asked the Student Government of the HLS to nominate student members to join the shield committee, but Royall Must Fall questioned the committee and expressed their dissatisfaction by posting “Student asks why Dean Minor chose the committee to change the crest. Where are student and staff voices? We hear you!” (2015, December 4) on Twitter. Although engaging student committee members showed that students' voices matter in the decision-making process, in fact, the selecting process could to some extent block the voice from people who might hold different opinions in the deliberations. I also noticed that only ten out of twelve committee members eventually signed the committee report, while Professor Annette Gordon-Reed and law student Annie Rittgers did not endorse the committee report. Nevertheless, there were no explanations of why opinions from Annette Gordon-Reed and Annie Rittgers were not taken up in the committee report. Notably, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed is a Black female faculty member at HLS, and three out of five faculty committee members are White faculty based on their appearance on the HLS faculty profiles (Faculty Profiles, n.d.). The information of the positionalities indicated that in the Shield Committee, some Black faculty and their standpoint were underrepresented in the deliberations though given the fact that the topic for discussing was related to the history of Black slavery at Harvard. That said, although the committee report tended to show that everyone’s opinion mattered, there was a possibility that White faculty were predominantly in charge of the Shield Committee but opposite opinions from Black faculty were not taken up in the decision-making process. The Committee Chair, Professor Mann, informed members of the HLS to schedule community meetings and invited them to submit their opinions and concerns regarding the issue of retiring the shield (Mann et al, 2016). As a result, more than 1,000 members of the Law School community including students, staff, faculty, and alumni participated in the discussions 63 through different formats such as two open discussion meetings, the faculty listserv, and separate email invitations distributed through the Alumni Office (Mann et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the committee report neither mentioned how they described this issue in the email sent to the HLS community nor did they tell how the Shield Committee would make the final decision regarding the over 1,000 submissions they received. Besides, the lack of transparency of how opinions collected from the HLS community were used in the committee meetings indicated that gathering opinions could be a non-performative step in the decision-making process as opinions collected might not be actually considered in the deliberations. 5.3.3 “Our” Issacs Royall, Jr. The committee report used three out of ten pages to introduce the history of the Royall Family and corrected some common misunderstandings regarding the Royall Family and the connection between the Royall Family and Harvard Law School. Although the committee report (2016) claimed that "it is sufficient that [Isaac Royall, Jr.'s] wealth came from slave labor. We need not charge with the alleged brutality of his father or credit him with his own alleged kindness", the report still mentioned that "There have been present claims of Isaac Royall, Sr.'s particular brutality and historical reports of Isaac Royall, Jr.'s supposed kindness as a master" (p. 2). Later, the committee report provided the first correction that not "both Royalls were primarily responsible for the execution of 88 enslaved persons by gibbeting, burning at the stake, or being broken on the wheel" (p. 3) because " 'our' Isaac Royall – Junior was 17 at that time and that it was his father who owned the slaves, there is no evidence of the role – whether prominent or otherwise – that either Isaac Royall played in suppressing the revolt, nor was there any evidence that would let us determine whether either one was any more or less brutal than his fellow slave-64 owners on Antigua" (p. 3). Although correcting certain misunderstandings is necessary to better understand the history of the Royall family, it is also necessary to ask the question why is this important in relation to the HLS shield? The committee report argued that “slavery in the Americas was inherently brutal, violent, oppressive and dehumanizing” (Mann, 2016, p. 2) and acknowledged that Isaac Royall Jr.’s wealth came from slave labor. But still, the committee also argued that a 17 year’s old young man would not be able to be involved in the slave massacre and the Royalls were no more or less brutal than other slave-owners in Antigua. The committee report said that they were not intended to argue that Isaac Royall, Jr. is an innocent and kind master, but they only provide a general critique to the history of slavery in America rather than particularly critique Isaac Royall, Jr. as a successor of his father’s heritage of slaves and estates. In fact, the language that the committee used still to some degree suggested the relative innocence of Isaac Royall, Jr. I noticed that in the committee report, it used “our” to describe Isaac Royall, Jr., “our” as a quote indicated that in the committee deliberations, some in the committee maintained that Isaac Royall, Jr. is “ours” who gave his bequest to Harvard, while his father Isaac Royall, Sr., is not “ours” and has no significant connection with the current Harvard Law School. This argument separated the past and the present and neglected the fact that Isaac Royall’s wealth was also accumulated from his father’s estates and enslaved people. Saying “our” Isaac Royall was not involved in the slave massacre was declaring that the foundation of Harvard Law School is not primarily based on violence and oppression. The second major correction clarified in the committee report (2016) is that Isaac Royall. Jr.’s bequest only supported the endorsement of the first part-time Royall Professor of Law, but “it was Isaac Parker, the Royall Professor, who created a Law Department at Harvard with 65 additional resources drawn from tuition, monies allocated by the Corporation” (p. 5). Instead of saying the Royall's bequest established HLS, clarifying that the bequest only supported a "part-time" professor showed that Royall had less influence on the establishment of the Law School. However, the committee report did not suggest that without the bequest from the Royall family to support the first part-time Royall Professor at Harvard, it might be harder for the Law Department to be established without the land and wealth accumulated from the labor extracted from the people enslaved by the Royalls. Those clarifications further reinforced the argument that the establishment of Harvard Law School only has indirect and insufficient relations with Isaac Royall, Jr. who thus far cannot be verified had played a role in the execution of the slave revolt. Further, the committee (2016) argued that “it is important to make clear that we are not judging Isaac Royall, a man of the eighteenth century, by standards of the twenty-first century. Instead, we are asking whether an institution in the twenty first century should be represented by a man of the eighteenth century whose only legacy was his money" (p. 8). However, such framings universalized the white standards of the eighteenth century and thus are fraught. There are different standards because Black people were critical of their enslavement at that time. In addition, the committee was arguing that the Royall family's bequest does not accurately reflect HLS's foundation and current values, and thus legitimized the decision of removing the shield. Besides, the committee maintained that the only legacy of the Royall family was the money, by arguing that, the committee was denying the influence of the Royall family on the establishment of the Law School, and ignoring the fact that the colonial history of HLS still has significant ongoing impacts on the current Harvard Law School. 66 5.3.4 Not Unique to the Royalls The committee report (2016) mentioned that the shield was designed in 1936 by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose as part of Harvard University’s tercentenary celebrations and was approved to use by the Harvard Corporation. By saying that, the committee was arguing that not until the 1930s did HLS start to use the Royall shield but the history of HLS is far earlier than that. Providing this fact, the committee highlighted that the shield was designed by an artist, rather than HLS leader's suggestion to draw on Royall's coat of arms. However, they did not explain why HLS leadership did not fully study the meaning of the shield at the time it was designed but only mentioned that the shield was used for decorative purposes. What is also absent in this statement is that it did not disclose the branding purpose of designing the shield because some had noted that the shield was also designed for the need of raising funds, and to celebrate the Royalls' place in Harvard's history (Johnson et al., 2015, November 20). This evidence contradicts HLS leaders’ statement that they were not aware of the connection between the shield and the Royall family. The committee report (2016) acknowledged that la Rose designed this shield based on Isaac Royal’s bookplate, but also asserted that “sheaves of wheat have long been a common element of heraldic devices – signifying such agricultural virtues as abundance, fertility, and a good harvest – and are by no means unique to the Royalls” (p. 6). Besides, the report also assumed that there is no evidence that la Rose or the Harvard Corporation knew how the Royalls accumulated their wealth, and maintained that few people at that time asked the questions in relation to the Royall family and their bequests made 150 years earlier. By arguing that the sheaves of wheat were not unique to the Royall family, the committee was disconnecting the relationship between the shield and the Royall family. The point here is not whether the sheaves 67 of wheat were quite common in use at that time, but it was la Rose who designed the shield based on the bookplate of Isaac Royal rather than HLS leadership’s suggestion. Also, arguing that la Rose and Harvard Corporation might not be aware of the history of the Royall family does not mean HLS leadership should not take any responsibility for finally adopting the shield without going into the meaning of the shield. The committee report (2016) further clarified that “the la Rose shield came into wider use in the mid-1990s as part of an apparent effort to give the Law School publications a more consistent ‘brand’” (p. 6), and the consistent use of that shield as the symbol of the Law School was relatively recent. However, the explanations of why the shield was more commonly used recently were missing in the committee report, given the fact that the connection between the HLS shield and the Royall coat of arms had already been known in 2000. HLS nevertheless did not explain why they kept using the shield instead of taking action to remove or change the shield when the connection was found but kept using the shield even more frequently. Given the fact that marketization became a trend in Western higher education, institutional brands become more significant in the competitions, I suggest that the more common use of the HLS shield might be used as a strategy to promote the brand of HLS, and thus attend to attract more top students and funding, and generate more revenues for the operation of the Law School. In the dean’s memorandum sent to the Harvard Corporation (Minow, Chu & Chu, 2016, March 3), they also argued that the Shield is not an anchoring part of their history because it was not created until 1936, while they also contradictorily argued that the shield is a symbol for identifying and expressing whom they mean to be. Although the shield was designed in 1936, it does not mean the shield cannot represent the Law School's history. Rather, the shield showed the foundation of Harvard Law School which is based on colonization and slavery by taking 68 Indigenous people’s land and exploiting Black enslaved people’s labor. Also, what is missing in the committee report and the Dean’s memorandum is that if the Royall shield cannot represent the history of HLS, what otherwise can represent the history of the Law School? In addition, the committee report (2016) highlighted several times that the slavery connection of the shield was not known until the near present because of Dr. Coquillette’s research, and before that, it was just simply a symbol of the Law School, no more and no less. President Faust and Senior Fellow Lee also agreed that if the slavery association was recognized at that time, they would very likely have a different choice (Faust & Lee, 2016, November 14). Although those arguments sound plausible but saying that was denying the colonial past of HLS if these arguments can be justified, why did HLS recently use the shield more often and why did HLS leaders not take any actions regarding the removal of the shield until Royall Must Fall activism and black tape incident happened? The argument of then HLS leaders would very likely have other choices also made the assumption that then HLS leaders were innocent choosing the controversial shield and also made the assumption that both current and then HLS leaders held anti-racism standpoints and HLS has already been an inclusive place for decades but denied to acknowledge the ongoing colonial and racist patterns embedded in HLS. 5.3.5 Retiring the Shield The Shield Committee finally made the recommendation to retire the Royall shield and suggested that the new official symbol of HLS “must more closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not” (Mann, 2016, p. 9). And they acknowledged that this decision can be disappointing to some people "for whom the shield invokes not Isaac Royal and his slaves but rather the institution they are proud to be part of" and "who believe the shield 69 should remain as an unblinking reminder of past injustice, urging us by its presence to do better" (pp. 9-10). However, by saying that, the committee did not provide reasons why they did not follow some committee members' suggestions of keeping the shield and making it a symbol for HLS to recognize its colonial past. In addition, at this point, what is absent is that they did not mention that keeping the shield could also result in African American students, other students of color, and people who care about equity feel disappointed and angry about maintaining the shield. Dean Minow in her memorandum expressed that 2016 was the right time to retire the shield and to create a new symbol that can represent the Law School’s mission and values as a way to prepare Harvard Law School’s bicentennial in 2017 (Minow et al., 2016, March 3). However, she did not name the reasons why it was the right time to have a new logo when the bicentennial of HLS was approaching. Although HLS did not eventually introduce a new logo in 2017, I suggested that the possible intention for HLS to plan to have a new logo before its bicentennial might contribute to the reason that it was a great opportunity for HLS to promote their brand. A new logo and the story behind that could show the public that HLS cares about students' voices and demands and attends to promote racial equality, inclusion and diversity on campus. Leaders at HLS extensively used terms such as justice, inclusion and diversity in their language, however by using these terms, HLS leaders were also trying to acknowledge that colonialism and racism only reflect the past of HLS but the current HLS is already inclusive. For instance, Dean Minow said she believed that although history cannot be chosen, the Law School can choose that for which they stand (Minow, Chu & Chu, 2016, March 14). And she maintained that the new shield should focus on demonstrating Harvard Law Schools’ vision and ideas such 70 as striving to affirm the commitment to academic rigor and truth, reasoning discourse and diverse perspectives, building a culture of mutual understanding and inclusiveness, as well as serving justice and advancing human freedom and welfare (Minow et al., 2016, March 14). In these statements, Dean Minow acknowledged that colonial history cannot be chosen but she did not acknowledge that colonialism and racism still exist at HLS. By saying a new shield should demonstrate HLS's visions and values of diversity and inclusion, Dean Minow was arguing that HLS is already a diverse and inclusive institution and introducing a new shield can solve the historical problem of racial inequalities at HLS. However, introducing a new shield without acknowledging HLS's colonial present and making substantive reforms of the racist and colonial patterns at HLS would not make HLS a more diverse and inclusive institution. The decision of removing the Royall shield was finally approved by President Faust and Harvard Corporation. President Faust (2016) suggested the importance of bringing history to light and learning from it. However, neither President Faust nor other leaders at the Law School proposed plans of how to bring the history to light and learn from it, and simply retiring the shield alone without acknowledging and changing the colonial present of HLS would not bring the colonial history of HLS to the light and learn from it. Nevertheless, the Shield Committee (2016) suggested that “the Committee recognized, indeed celebrates, that Harvard Law School is a large and diverse place populated by people who are both inclined and whom we train to express their views vigorously” (p. 10). The committee maintained that HLS is already a diverse and inclusive place for people to give their opinions. Ironically, it was student activism that was used here to show HLS is a diverse and dynamic place because the Law School trained their students to actively express their views. However, the Committee did not state the reality that student activists’ voices were neglected by HLS leaders several times during the Royall Must 71 Fall protests and different voices in the Committee that were said to be valued but were not taken up in the decision-making process. 5.4 Analysis of the Debates In this section, I detailed the major debates regarding the removal of the Harvard Law School shield. I identified two central debates: First, whether Harvard Law School should remove the current shield? To study this debate, I analyzed some key posts from Royall Must Fall’s Twitter and Facebook pages, a letter that Royall Must Fall sent to Dean Minow, and “Survey of the Arguments Offered by Members of the Law School Community” section in the Shield Committee report. The second major debate was whether the current slavery shield should be remained and used as a sign to remind people of the history of slavery. I analyzed a letter titled “A Different View” written by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, and law student Annie Rittgers who joined this view. Both of them were Shield Committee members but did not sign the committee report. 5.4.1 Royall Must Fall’s Demands The Royall Must Fall movement was initiated by a group of students at Harvard Law School who demonstrated that the shield should no longer be in use in any settings at Harvard Law School, and later on, many staff and faculty joined the movement to support students’ demands. Royall Must Fall along with Reclaim Harvard Law expressed their demands on social media and launched several protests on campus. At the beginning stage of the Royall Must Fall movement, students posted their opinions and demands on social media and invited more students to join them. The earliest argument they made on Twitter is “Isaac Royall’s coat-of-72 arms, (the three stacked wheat sheaves) which remain Harvard Law School’s crest to this day is a badge of shame” (RoyallMustFall, 2015, October 21). Beyond the slavery shield, they further argued that “HLS must be decolonized. That means changing the [shield] and including [people of color] in the process” (RoyallMustFall, 2015, November 20), and “We must move together to confront systemic racism” (RoyallMustFall, 2015, November 21). According to Royall Must Fall's tweets, it is important to see that student activists' demand was more than just removing the HLS shield, rather, they put forward further arguments that HLS needs to be decolonized and systemic racism should be eliminated. That said, the shield is a symbol for people in the HLS community to be aware that systemic racism and colonialism are still severe issues at HLS and they called for HLS leaders to attend to working on addressing racial inequalities, both colonial and racist past and present at HLS. Although the demand of Royall Must Fall focused on removing the HLS shield, they intended to call for the HLS community to confront systemic racism as they stated clearly in the letter sent to Dean Minow, “remove the coat of arms of Isaac Royal, Jr. from the crest of Harvard Law School [is] a first step toward broader reforms” (Royall Must Fall, n.d.). Thus, the purpose of the Royall Must Fall movement did not merely focus on the removal of the shield but more importantly, broader reforms on racial inequalities. However, as I analyzed the Shield Committee Report and Harvard leaders' announcement, they merely mentioned the removal of the shield without mentioning student protests' demands of addressing present racism and colonialism at HLS. After the protests and the black tape incident, Dean Minow finally claimed that she would form a committee to discuss the shield of Harvard Law School. However, Royall Must Fall tweeted on December 4, 2015, that "Student asks why Dean Minow chose the committee to change the [shield]. Where are student and staff voices? We hear you!” (RoyallMustFall, 2015, 73 December 4). This tweet indicated that people from Royall Must Fall were dissatisfied with the dean's decision of forming a committee to discuss this issue since the committee would exclude many other students and staff’s voices. On December 7, 2015, students from Reclaim Harvard Law waiting outside of the Dean’s Office to further denounce the slavery shield, while “Dean Minow refused to respond to student and staff demands today” (RoyallMustFall, 2015, December 7). Although it is hard to judge whether forming a committee to discuss the issues around the shield is an appropriate approach, what is clear is that leaders at HLS refused to hear the demands of the student activists and were hesitant to respond to the protests. Ignoring students' voices also indicated that certain students’ voices that were deemed to threaten the status quo were appeared to be marginalized in the university decision-making process. In other words, although university leadership engaged students’ voices in the decision-making process, those engagements were selective, in particular, those that were not deemed threatening to the status quo. “Harvard: Royall Must Fall” is a Facebook page created by members of Royall Must Fall in 2015 as an organizing tool. On February 16, 2016, Royall Must Fall posted on the Facebook page that “If our main reason for keeping this Shield is the fear of losing money from alumni or other donors, it makes us even worse as a School. It devalues our mission in this society and cheapens what we claim to stand for as Harvard Law School” (Harvard: Royall Must Fall, 2016, February 16). This post indicated that some might argue if HLS removed its shield, it might disappoint some alumni or other donors and thus lose certain funding from them. These debates indicated the conflict between academic capitalism and equity. From students at Royall Must Fall's viewpoint, the mission of HLS is not just attracting funding, rather, equity and justice are important values to pursue and goals to achieve. However, in terms of the idea to introduce a 74 new logo before the bicentennial, HLS leaders might intend to balance academic capitalism and equity because an “improved” brand can not only promote a “diverse” and “inclusive” image of HLS but might also attract more revenue for the Law School. 5.4.2 A Different View Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (2016) expressed her opinion on the shield of Harvard Law School in a document named “A Different View” that has been attached in the Committee report, and she acknowledged that her view is the minority. However, notably a minority view is not necessarily less important than a majority view, and the point here is why Gordon-Reed’s view was not taken up by the Shield Committee. To Gordon-Reed, the burning question she realized was that “What would be the best and easiest way to keep alive the memory of the people whose labor gave Isaac Royall the resources to purchase the land whose sale helped found Harvard Law School” (Gordon-Reed, 2016, p. 1)? Gordon-Reed (2016) argued that it would be the most truthful and transparent way to preserve the current shield and link it to a historically sound interpretive narrative about it to ensure that the true history of the roots and relation with their progenitors – the enslaved people not the Royalls, is not lost (Gordon-Reed, 2016, p.1). The point that Gordon-Reed was expressing here is that it is more important to remember the enslaved people who made significant contributions to the establishment of HLS and those enslaved people should not be easily forgotten after the shield was removed. To do so, Gordon-Reed suggested that the easiest way is to keep the current shield while paying attention to remembering the enslaved people and the violent history of the HLS's foundation rather than looking at the shield as a symbol to honor the Royall family. Further, Gordon-Reed (2016) in the letter – “A Different View” argued that the HLS 75 shield is different from the Cecil Rhodes’ statue at Cape Town University, because the statue represents the honor of Rhodes, while the wheat sheaves on the other hand do not physically represent Isaac Royall. In addition, Gordon-Reed (2016) asserted that, thousands of students and graduates at Harvard Law School have made its current public reputation, students and faculty benefit from what graduates did after the adoption of the shield and without knowing the meaning, as well as many of the graduates are working on justice and equality and exhibited a profound commitment to public service, thus their accomplishments and work added new meanings to the shield (p. 2). The point that Gordon-Reed made here is that the meaning of the shield can be interpreted differently and HLS alumni who made significant contributions to justice added new meanings to the shield. Thus, although the shield to some degree reflected HLS's injustice past, many HLS students' and alumni's efforts on advocating for justice should not be neglected and placed after the Royall family. However, what is missing in Gordon-Reed’s argument in “A Different Voice” is that HLS students can also be part of the problem of systemic racism at HLS and in the country. Given that HLS is one of the most prestigious Law schools in the U.S., most of the students who had the chance to study at HLS come from families with privileged backgrounds. Through studying at HLS, their privileges can be reproduced and they continue to serve the unjust and racist systems at HLS and the United States. Gordon-Reed (2016) in the letter – “A Different View” also suggested that the 200th anniversary of HLS would be a great opportunity to re-dedicate the Law School and the shield, to make explicit the debt to the enslaved people and the Law School community. Gordon-Reed (2016) acknowledged that looking at the slavery shield and thinking about the related history would cause uncomfortable feelings, but she argued that people at Harvard Law School need to learn how to govern the unpleasant feelings to be ready to implement Harvard Law Schools’ 76 “modern commitment to justice and equality through a well-known symbol that connects both” (pp. 3-4). In terms of Gordon-Reed’s opinion, HLS’s 200th anniversary could be an important great opportunity to express HLS's debt to enslaved people, however, her suggestion on focusing on acknowledging enslaved people appeared to not have been taken up by HLS leaders. Instead, HLS leaders saw its bicentennial as an opportunity to introduce a new shield that reflects HLS's current values of anti-racism, inclusion and justice. With that in mind, HLS leaders did not acknowledge the labor stolen from the enslaved people and the Law School’s colonial past. Likewise, Daniel R. Coquillette, the professor who disclosed the association between the HLS shield and the Royall coat of arms also expressed his opinion in a news article in The Washington Post titled “Why some students say Harvard Law School’s crest is ‘a source of shame’”. He disagreed that removing the shield is the best approach and suggested that the history of the Law School can be used as a way of educating people about the challenges that we are facing (Larimer, 2015, November 4). Coquillette also argued the importance of understanding the history of Harvard Law School and the Royall family’s background, and he encouraged further discussions around the Royalls (Larimer, 2015, November 4). Coquillette’s opinion resonated with President Faust's words of "bringing it to light and learning from it" (Faust & Lee, 2016, November 14). By saying that, acknowledging HLS's colonial past and present and tackle systemic racism and colonialism at Harvard is arguably more important than merely removing a shield. However, the result is that the shield was removed but HLS’s colonial past and particularly colonial present were not properly acknowledged and addressed. 5.4.3 A Contested Question The question of whether to remove or remain the HLS shield is contested. There is no 77 simple answer of whether removing or remaining the HLS shield is a better choice, but it depends on people's interpretations of the same shield. For instance, Jonathan Hiles, a third-year student at Harvard Law School expressed his opinion in a commentary piece titled “Respect the Past: Remove the Royall Seal” in The Harvard Crimson. Hiles (2015, December 14) asserted that “three cartoonish sheaves of wheat are less an educative reminder of Harvard’s racist past than a sign of its racist present”, and argued that “we don’t need the names or insignias of racists to remind us of slavery or Jim Crow”. In terms of the committee report (2016), many older African-American alumni regard the shield as a pride which reflected their accomplishment because their merit was not well recognized decades ago. But also, there are persons of color who perceive the shield as a symbol of “past oppressions” and “present discriminations” (Mann et al., 2016, March 3, p. 8). There were many complicated questions raised by the Shield Committee regarding the debates on the shield such as “when the symbol means different things to different members of the same community. Can the symbol retain its former meaning in the face of knowledge that has added a new, unsavory meaning to it? Can symbols accommodate multiple meanings?” (Mann, 2016, p. 7). It is important to sit with the complexities of these contested questions, but no simple answer of removing or retaining the shield is a better option. In this study, I looked at why the Shield Committee and leadership at Harvard finally made the decision to remove the shield, but passed over these complexities to move to a branding decision. I analyzed the rationales and implications in the following section. 5.5 Discussions The Royall Must Fall movement initiated by students at Harvard Law School called themselves an anti-racist movement, they also argued this movement could be the first step for 78 decolonizing Harvard. After protests and deliberations, leaders at Harvard finally made the decision to remove the Royall shield of the Law School, acknowledging that the current shield could not represent the modern values of Harvard Law School, and it would be a great opportunity for HLS to introduce a new shield that represents the Law School's diversity and inclusion in its 200th anniversary in 2017. Thus, some students affiliated with Royall Must Fall cheered "Royall has fallen" on Twitter. But has Royall really fallen? In this section, I further discuss this student movement and the results and provide some critiques. 5.5.1 Limitations of Royall Must Fall Royall Must Fall achieved their goal to remove the shield of HLS, and I appreciated the efforts that activists and other supporters spent on demanding HLS leaders to make a change. What Royall Must Fall has done was certainly work on anti-racism. However inevitably, there were certain limitations of the Royall Must Fall movement. By identifying their limitations, I am not criticizing what Royall Must Fall has done, rather, I suggest it is important to learn from the work on anti-racism that Royall Must Fall has done and open up discussions for people who work on anti-racism in higher education and beyond. The first limitation I might suggest is that Royall Must Fall is an anti-racist movement, based on the data I have analyzed, Royall Must Fall only focused on the history of Black slavery at Harvard. Although I acknowledge HLS students might protest for other racialized and underrepresented peoples in other circumstances. Student activists in the Royall Must Fall movement argued that Harvard Law School must be decolonized, while when discussing decolonization in higher education, it is arguably very necessary to mention Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and their land, which is missing in the arguments of the Royall Must Fall. According 79 to Tuck and Yang (2012), many people casually refer to the notion of decolonization while those discussions rarely mention Indigenous people. Similarly, in the Royall Must Fall movement, the primary goal was to call for Harvard Law School leaders to remove the shield that related to enslaved people, while never mentioning the land and property that Isaac Royall gave to Harvard Law School was stolen from Indigenous peoples in the first place. Royall Must Fall discussed the relationship between enslaved people and European settlers and the wealth and land accumulated by the Royall family and thereafter entitled to Harvard Law School. However, they did not argue the land originally belonged to Indigenous peoples and there is no need to be grateful for the bequest of stolen land by Isaac Royall. As Tuck and Yang (2012) suggested that "decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life" (p. 21) and "Decolonization eliminates settler property rights and settler sovereignty. It requires the abolition of land as property and upholds the sovereignty of Native land and people" (p. 26). By repeatedly saying the Royall family’s bequest to HLS, many students and HLS leaders' language reinforced the assumption that the land HLS was located on was supposed to be owned by the Royall family rather than Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous peoples’ role in the foundation of HLS has not been acknowledged. I suggested future discussions about the history of an institution might engage Indigenous people's land and rights and for university leadership and the larger community to consider to working on the reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples. The second limitation is that Royall Must Fall stopped their protests and demands on social media soon after the decision of retiring the shield had been made and did not continue to demand leadership at HLS to address its colonial present. According to my data, I did not find student activists to point out that removing the shield alone would not address the colonial present of the Law School and would not make the intuition a more inclusive and diverse place. 80 Given the complexity and wider dynamics of institutional change, Royall Must Fall’s demands were limited to lead to structural changes of Harvard Law School. Three initial demands that Royall Must Fall proposed for addressing the Royall legacy were: removing the slavery shield; creating a permanent physical acknowledgement of Harvard Law School’s legacy of slavery, memorializing those who were brutalized by the Royall family; and changing the name of "Isaac Royall Chair" or allocating the chair to a Critical Race Theory professor (Reclaim Harvard Law Demands, 2015, December 4). However, not all initial demands were achieved in the end, instead, soon after the retirement of the shield, some members of Royall Must Fall announced their achievement and stopped protests on social media. Student activists intended to raise awareness in the HLS community that racism is a severe issue at HLS and Royall Must Fall successfully achieved the goal of removing the shield, but HLS leaders shifted the attention from HLS’s colonial and racist present to a logo. Indeed, removing a shield, creating a physical acknowledgement and renaming a professor can be first stages of challenging racial injustice at HLS, but those changes, inherently, would neither bring more resources to students of color nor empower marginalized groups at HLS (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015). Furthermore, removing the Royall shield was just one of the demands that have finally been accomplished. I did not find evidence that Harvard Law School created a permanent physical acknowledgement to memorize the legacy of enslaved people and changed the name of the Royall Chair. Earlier than Royall Must Fall, Professor Janet Halley (2008), the Royall Chair of Harvard Law School acknowledged that "the funds that established the Royall Chair derived, directly and/or indirectly, from the sale of human beings and the appropriation of their labor" (p. 124), but until now, the name of the Royall Chair or Royall Professor has not been replaced. Moreover, members of the Royall Must Fall once claimed that “we won’t stop until this entire 81 country faces its history and addresses its racist heritage” (2015, November 22), they stopped posting anything and put forward to further demands on their Twitter page since 2016. Therefore, even if Royall Must Fall members tweeted “Royall has fallen” to announce their success, did that mean Royall has really fallen? I would argue that the legacy of the Royall family indicates colonialism and racism at Harvard Law School, and Royall would not fall unless colonialism and racism were eliminated and reconciliations between racialized, Indigenous peoples and settlers were achieved. However, those milestones would not be simply achieved by removing a shield and require significant efforts on institutional change and work on decolonization. Otherwise, what had really fallen could only be the activist group Royall Must Fall if they simply suggested the removal of the shield was the fall of the Royall legacy. 5.5.2 A Non-performative Change Some important questions to consider are: why did HLS leaders refuse to respond to Royall Must Fall activists until the black tape accident happened and why did Harvard leaders finally agree to remove the shield? In this section, I used the concept of non-performativity and the theory of interest convergence to explain reasons and implications for HLS leaders to agree to remove the shield. I also argued that the removal of the HLS shield is a non-performative change made by HLS leadership and this action alone would not make HLS less racist and more diverse. The issue raised by Royall Must Fall was the HLS shield has a connection with the coat of arms of the Royall family, and the shield reflecting the violent and colonial history and foundation of HLS should be removed. However, not until the black tape incident took place, did HLS leaders start to respond to the issue of the racist shield. The HLS shield is an issue about 82 HLS's past while the black tape incident was a current one reflected that racism is still a severe problem at HLS. The Royall Must Fall movement and the black tape incident brought pressure for HLS leaders to address racial injustice on campus. However, HLS leaders did not explicitly discuss the black tape incident, instead, Dean Minow formed a shield committee to study the shield. However, what the shield committee had been studied, in terms of the shield committee, focused on HLS’s colonial past rather than its colonial present, and working on removing the shield could serve as a PR strategy to show the HLS community that the leadership were addressing racial injustice. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, I found that HLS leaders partially acknowledged the Law School’s colonial past, but did not acknowledge that colonialism still has an ongoing and profound impact on the current HLS and systemic racism is still embedded in the structure of the Law School. By removing the shield and arguing that the current values of HLS are anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, HLS leaders move the focus from a racist incident to anti-racism efforts that HLS leaders were working on. Therefore, the removal of the shield served as a symbolic politics to respond to pressure from the public and moved the attention on HLS's colonial present to its colonial past. Although making structural reforms at HLS is difficult, it was much easier to remove a shield, thus, I argue that HLS's decision on removing the shield is an non-performative action and failed to interrupt Whiteness and the reproduction of racism. By arguing it is a non-performative decision, I suggest that removing a shield alone would not make an institution less racist and more diverse but the public might perceive this non-performative action as HLS's efforts on addressing racism and perceive HLS as a diverse and inclusive institution. According to Ahmed (2006), recognizing the institutional nature of racism does not mean it is a solution, rather, the acknowledgement of systemic racism could become a technology for the reproduction 83 of the racism of individuals (p. 46). Because the recognition of the institutional racism provided a comfortable cover and some people might not see themselves as involved in institutional racism, and further, this type of recognition might even be converted into an expression of institutional and national pride which is ironically a distortion of the truth (Ahmed, 2016). In the case of Harvard Law School, the leaders also acknowledged HLS's colonial past and showed the public that they were actively addressing the issue. Although it appears that HLS leaders only made a non-performative change, their acknowledgement of HLS's colonial past and commitment to antiracism, inclusion and diversity could create an imaginary that HLS leadership is addressing racism well and HLS is being a more diverse and inclusive place. Removing the shield as a non-performative decision did not just relieve the pressure from the activism and move the focus away from HLS’s colonial present, this decision also conformed to the principle of interest convergence. Specifically, an important reason for HLS leaders to agree with Royall Must Fall's demand of removing the shield was that this decision would not cause financial loss of HLS and could even serve the interest of HLS leaders. Dean Minow (2016) in her memorandum mentioned that “there is no donor whose intent would be undermined [and] the shield itself involves no resources entrusted in our care”. This quote indicated that an important fact for Dean Minor to recommend to retire the shield to Harvard Coporation was because this decision would not cause financial loss and undermine donors’ intent. The leadership of Harvard Law School also mentioned that removing the shield and introducing a new shield could be beneficial to rebrand HLS in its upcoming 200th anniversary. Rather than taking the opportunity to acknowledge HLS’s colonial present and make institutional changes to address systemic racism at HLS, leaders took its upcoming bicentennial as a great opportunity for rebranding. As Ahmed (2016) suggested, diversity can be used as a branding exercise to 84 reimage the institution as being diverse and committed to equality and antiracism (p. 153), and in this case, HLS leaders use the value of anti-racism and diversity to brand the institutional but not necessarily make institutional changes. Although HLS did not eventually introduce a new shield by then, they had the intention to introduce a new shield which might help the public reimagine HLS as a diverse and inclusive institution. An improved brand – a new shield that can reflect HLS's stated values of equity, justice and inclusion – might help HLS to succeed in competitions with other national and global Law Schools, attract more full fee-paying students and generate more revenue for HLS. Thus, the effort on removing the slavery shield did not just satisfy most of the protesters' demands but used it as an approach to promote a diverse and inclusive brand of Harvard Law School that could serve the interest of the leadership. Nevertheless, I argued that removing the shield alone was a non-performative change and did not address systemic racism, it does not mean this change was unimportant. Rather, removing the shield could also be considered as an initial step for leadership at HLS to look at the colonialism of the institution and invite more conversations and debates around anti-racism and diversity. But what is more important to look at is whether any performative or intuitional change will be made in the future based on the current conversation of racial injustice and colonialism. 85 Chapter 6: Imperial College London In this chapter, I studied the decision of Imperial College London to change its 1908 coat of arms ("The College crest", n.d.). I first described the social and political moment in which the change took place which included: a new wave of the Black Lives Matter movement related to the murder of George Floyd, COVID-19 global pandemic and anti-Asian racism. Then I analyzed how leaders at Imperial College London explained the removal of the Latin motto on its coat of arms within the context of competition for students, calls for greater diversity and inclusion at ICL and debates about how to grapple with past and present racism. 6.1 Background 6.1.1 Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racist Protests A new wave of the Black Lives Matter movement took place in many parts of the world after the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man who was killed by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25, 2020 (The New York Times, 2020, November 5). The video shows George Floyd repeatedly saying "I can't breathe" while being pinned to the ground by the police officer's knee spread widely on the internet and thus incited large-scale protests against police brutality and systemic racism in Minneapolis, in the United States, and many other countries around the world (The New York Times, 2020, November 5). Although the murder of George Floyd happened in the United States, his voice "I can't breathe" also shocked and resonated deeply with British people (Mohdin & Swann, 2020, July 29). In the U.K., around 260 towns and cities held protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter in June and early July around the whole country (Mohdin & Swann, 2020, July 29). Professor Hakim Adi and Professor Michael Biggs said the current anti-racist protests were the 86 largest since the late 18th century in British history, and more importantly, those protests also took place in many places in the U.K. where there are actually not many Black people (Mohdin & Swann, 2020, July 29). The Black Lives Matter movement can be traced to the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black teenager in Sanford, Florida (Hillstrom, 2018). The death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman who shot Martin triggered nationwide tensions on racial discrimination and civil rights, and inspired the development of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media created by three Black women who were social justice activists in order to raise the issue of police violence against Black people in the U.S. (Hillstrom, 2018). Later on, the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown received nationwide attention and a national Black Lives Matter campaign thus took place (Hillstrom, 2018). Although some people perceive the Black Lives Matter movement as disruptive and violent, some historians argue that many events that are considered admirable today were also perceived in a negative and unfavorable view in the past such as Martin Luther King's speech "I Have a Dream" (Hillstrom, 2018). Some supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement also argued that the BLM movement is to fight for civil rights, address racial discrimination and achieve equality (Hillstrom, 2018). In addition to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the murder of George Floyd also triggered other forms of protests or movements against institutional racism around the world. For instance, movements with hashtags of #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM took place on June 10, 2020, to protest for Black professors and students who are historically underrepresented in higher education and the STEM fields in particular ("#ShutDownAcademia #ShutDownSTEM”, n.d.). The organizers of these movements also claimed the research and 87 technologies they created would reinforce anti-Black narratives and weaponized against Black people, and they had the ethical obligation to stop doing “business as usual” and advocate for eradicating anti-Black racism (“#ShutDownAcademia #ShutDownSTEM”, n.d.). On September 9th and 10th, 2020, a scholar strike was also launched in Canadian universities to protest anti-racism and a liberated global future (“Scholar Strike Canada”, n.d.). Canadian scholars acknowledged that many of Black, Indigenous and racialized scholars are precariously employed and demand the current underrepresentation in Canadian universities must be addressed (“Scholar Strike Canada”, n.d.). Imperial College London also showed its solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. ICL posted on its Twitter account that "If you think racism is only an issue in the US, you're wrong. #Black Lives Matter, and we stand with our Black students, staff, and alumni. For any members of our community feeling angry, sad, scared or frustrated, we are here to support you" (Imperial College, 2020, June 1). Alice Gast, President of ICL, expressed her feelings that "My heart goes out to all Black students, colleagues, alumni and friends who have been directly or indirectly hurt by recent events. I share their grief and outrage” (Salhotra & Scheuber, 2020, June 2). President Gast also committed to work on addressing racial inequality and injustice, and promote diversity excellence, in which she said "As a leader of a top university, committed to equality, diversity and inclusion, I am determined to not just show solidarity but to work with our community to enact change. As a university, we can do more to address racial inequality and injustice – and we will” (Salhotra & Scheuber, 2020, June 2). Imperial College London also put forward some new measures as below to address racial inequality, including removing the Latin motto from the coat of arms  Working with Imperial As One, the College’s BAME advisory group, to develop a 88 concrete action plan to make a tangible difference in Imperial's community and wider society.  Rolling out new advice and support to equip staff and students to be better white allies.  Driving forward a new outreach programme targeting Black students in London with the aim of doubling the number coming to Imperial by 2024-25.  Establishing a new scholarship fund to support Black students.  Ceasing use of the College’s historic Latin motto in any new materials in order to better reflect the College’s culture, values and commitment to diversity.  Commissioning a working group to examine the College's history and legacy (Evanson & Scheuber, 2020, June 5). 6.1.2 COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Racism The coronavirus pandemic triggered anti-Asian racism in many places around the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals, who have East Asian backgrounds, in particular, reported more experiences of racism (Balvaneda, Roemer, Hayes-Skelton, Yang & Ying, n.d.). There were also shocking levels of racism reported by Chinese people in the U.K. after the outbreak of the coronavirus, for instance, some students reported verbal and physical harassment because of wearing a mask (Campbell, 2020, February 9). Anti-Asian racism also ignited in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Liao (2020, May 16) noted that "Anti-racism sentiments are not new. It's just that COVID-19 has been shining a spotlight on an ugly issue that many people in Canada have always faced, and has now escalated". Lee (2020) argued that calling COVID-19 as "China Virus" or Wuhan virus" would hinder the ability to address the global pandemic and she also demonstrated that neo-racism limits the ability to respond to the 89 coronavirus effectively and called for action of addressing neo-racism in higher education institutions and in an even wider context. At Imperial College London, the president reiterated the importance of supporting staff and students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, and strengthened the leadership's commitment to addressing racial inequality. President Gast and President of the Imperial College Union, Abhijay Sood acknowledged that “we need to do more to create a diverse and inclusive community across our campuses. That starts with zero tolerance for any racial abuse or harassment. All students should be treated with respect and dignity” (Gast & Sood, 2020, June 12). Although the leaders of ICL committed to taking the coronavirus and their commitment to tackling racial inequality and injustice very seriously, some students still showed their concerns related to anti-Asian racism (Sheppard, 2020, March 09). A Chinese ICL student maintained that there is more fear among Asian students than European students, and some Chinese students are worried that wearing masks would bring racist abuse to them (Sheppard, 2020, March 09). 6.2 Decision to Remove the Lattin Motto 6.2.1 The Coat of Arms Imperial College London’s official website introduces its coat of arms, it says that the coat of arms of Imperial College London (Figure 3) was assigned by Royal Warrant on June 6, 1908, and the main image on the coat of arms displays a book representing knowledge (“The College crest”, n.d.). Imperial College London claimed on the website that the coat of arms would only be occasionally used in formal or ceremonial contexts to “promote the heritage and history of the College such as degree certificates, invitations to formal College events, and sports 90 team apparel and merchandise” (“About Imperial”, n.d.; “The College crest”, n.d.). Figure 3 Original ICL Coat of Arms This description reinforced that the coat of arms was assigned by Royal Warrant rather than coined by ICL itself. By saying that, ICL leaders were stressing that the historical responsibilities for ICL to produce scientific knowledge and serve the empire were assigned by the British Royals, but with the development of the British society and now in a different historical period, the values and missions of ICL have changed. This statement also noted that the coat of arms would only be occasionally used, however, it is also important to note that the coat of arms was usually used in some of the most formal and important events of ICL and the importance of these occasions indicated the significance of the coat of arms. Besides, as the description suggested, the coat of arms was used to promote its heritage and history which reflect that ICL was proud of its historical mission of serving the scientific and technological development of the British Imperial and ICL still inherited the honor of assigned the coat of arms by Royal Warrant. The motto which had been removed after the murder of George Floyd was in Latin – 91 “Scientia imperii decus et tutamen” meaning “Scientific knowledge, the crowning glory and the safeguard of the empire” (“The College crest”, n.d.). Removing this motto on the coat of arms was one of the new measures that ICL leaders proposed to tackle racial inequality at ICL (Evanson, Scheuber, 2020, June 5) which was in accordance with ICL's commitment to support Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic staff and students at ICL and eliminate those significant barriers for BAME people in education and employment ("Race equality", n.d.). On the ICL website, it says that the new coat of arms (Figure 4) could better reflect the Imperial College's modern culture and value as well as their commitment to embracing a diverse and inclusive institution ("The College crest", n.d.). The content on the website also noted that the College could not change the motto because it was assigned as part of its Royal Warrant, therefore, the College could only choose to stop displaying the motto ("The College crest", n.d.). Figure 4: Updated ICL Coat of Arms Although the Latin motto that indicates ICL’s imperial mission has been removed, the official website of ICL does not interpret the meanings of other elements on the coat of arms. I thus argue that removing the Latin motto on the coat of arms alone would not change the 92 colonial nature of this crest. For instance, on the ICL coat of arms, the images such as the goddess accordion and lions are the same as the images on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom (Figure 5), but ICL this adoption was not been mentioned. Therefore, even though the Latin motto has been removed, the remaining part of the coat of arms is still problematic and indicates the colonial history of ICL, and remaining the images that adopted from the Royal coat of arms of the U.K. as well as the name of the college itself reflected the legacy of Royal Warrant. Figure 5 Royal Coat of Arms of the U.K. Another Latin word that still remains on the ICL coat of arms is “SCIENTIA”. The meaning of this Latin term is knowledge. However, the ICL website does not define the term knowledge. Although the term knowledge sounds neutral, it can also be exclusive and problematic, particularly, knowledge in this situation most likely refers to Eurocentric and scientific knowledge. At ICL, the majority of disciplines and research groups are in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), there are four faculties at ICL 93 namely Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Natural Sciences, and Imperial College Business School (“Faculties and departments”, n.d.; “A-Z Research groups”, n.d.). The structure of the faculties determined that most of the research groups are also focused on the STEM field (“A-Z Research groups”, n.d). Nevertheless, the structure of STEM fields has been argued as racist because its discriminatory beliefs, policies, values, and distribution of resources can help maintain inequalities and reproduce racism in higher education (McGee, 2020). Given the fact that a large portion of resources of ICL is contributed to the field of STEM, interrupting the status quo of racial inequality would be very challenging. Instead of making institutional changes on addressing racism and the colonial structures at ICL, it was much easier to remove the Latin motto on the coat of arms as a way to deny scientific knowledge produced at ICL is not to serve imperialism. Although whether removing the Latin motto is an appropriate move is debatable, what is clear is that although updating a coat of arms alongside other changes that proposed might be important to raise awareness of racial injustice at ICL but were very limited to address the colonial structure and foundation of ICL and would not challenge racial inequalities and make ICL a more diverse and inclusive institution. 6.2.2 ICL Leaders’ explanations Leaders at ICL including President Alice Gast, President of the Imperial College Union, Abhijay Sood, and Provost Ian Walmsley sent public announcements regarding the murder of George Floyd and their stance of addressing racial inequality and injustice to the ICL community. In this section, I analyzed those announcements to answer my research questions of how ICL leaders explain the removal of the Latin motto, how was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used and to what extent ICL leaders acknowledge their colonial past and 94 present. In the letter that President Gast and President of the Imperial College Union Abhijay Sood sent to students, they first acknowledged that "persistent racial inequality and injustice" exist "in Britain and around the world" and "We must pull together and collaborate as a community to support those who are angry and afraid” (Gast & Sood, 2020, June 12). By saying that, it showed that ICL leaders acknowledged racism, racial inequality and injustice as a global problem but they positioned ICL as a community that fights against racism, inequalities and injustice. They further asserted that "we affirm our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, and our solidarity with all who are rising to combat racism. We all have the responsibility and opportunity to address racial inequality and injustice" (Gast & Sood, 2020, June 12). Without acknowledging that ICL is also a part of the problem of racism, ICL leaders extensively used languages of equality, diversity and inclusion to claim they were committed to anti-racism and were working on addressing racial inequalities, and one of the measures was "removing the Latin motto from the university crest to better reflect our culture, values and commitment to diversity" and they would further “examine Imperial’s history and legacy” by looking at “how we represent our legacy on our campuses through statues and memorials and also awards and other College activities” (Gast & Sood, 2020, June 12). Nevertheless, as I have analyzed in the last section, only removing the Latin motto would still maintain the nature of colonial power and oppression of the coat of arms as well as the college itself, and similarly, other efforts on examining ICL’s colonial legacy through making changes on campus statues and memorials are also very limited to address racial inequalities. ICL Provost Ian Walmsley also sent a message to the ICL community to express his stance towards the BLM movement and anti-racism and he mentioned the removal of the Latin 95 motto on the coat of arms as well. Walmsley (2020) firstly acknowledged the death of George Floyd and the significant impact of the BLM movement, as he said "I recognise that this event, and many others preceding it, have a significant impact within our community, especially among our Black students and staff” (Walmsley, 2020). What is absent in this announcement is that Walmsley did not explicitly say what were these “many others preceding” BLM movement. For instance, not only the recent COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian racism but also systemic racism that has been embedded in the institution and has a profound impact on the foundation and structure of ICL. Indeed, the murder of George Floyd and the new wave of global BLM movement could have a significant impact among Black students and staff at ICL, but Walmsley did not acknowledge that ongoing and profound systemic racism at ICL is affecting Black, Asian, and minority ethnic students and staff in many circumstances every day and made them underrepresented in the institution. Walmsley (2020) then noted that it was the BLM movement that instigated the ICL community to make a change in their institution. However, what he did not mention was that racism was not new at ICL, but why did they decide to make a difference in this particular situation? Walmsley (2020) further argued that “We must redouble our efforts on practical steps so that all members of the College community are treated alike, fairly and with respect”, by saying “redouble our efforts”, Walmsley acknowledged that what they were doing and had already done was great, but those efforts need to be redoubled. Nevertheless, what were the efforts and how were they going to redouble the efforts were missing here. Also, this statement meant that all members at ICL were not treated alike, fairly and with respect now, but he did not put it that way. The only effort that is clear is that “We have eliminated the Latin motto from the College crest. The shield now has a single world: scientia – knowledge” (Walmsley, 2020) but it is hard 96 to be persuaded that changing a logo can make an institution a more diverse and inclusive place. Walmsley (2020) also noted that “We must recognise our limitations and make changes to ensure that we are truly an inclusive and diverse institution, fully committed to equality and opportunity……as future leaders, your ideas will help shape the College and the world in important ways”. In this statement, Walmsley extensively used the language of diversity, inclusion and equity but he did not mention how ICL could achieve these goals and did not mention what were the limitations that ICL needs to deal with? By avoiding saying their limitations and merely mentioning their goals without substantive actions, this announcement and the decision of updating the coat of arms can only be seen as a symbolic politics or public relations strategy to respond to pressure brought by the BLM movement and activists. Also, Walmsley’s statement positioned ICL students as “future leaders”, however, in a White dominant institution, BAME students are less likely to access and are underrepresented compared with White students. Thus, this statement reinforced the assumption that White students are more likely to become future leaders. Portraying ICL as future leaders also devalued those students who attend less prestigious universities where BAME students have greater opportunities to access are less likely to become future leaders of the world. By saying "shape the College and the world in important ways", the provost also positioned ICL, a Western institution, has significant global impact, which perpetuates the imaginary that Western institutions and prestigious universities in terms of the standard of reputation and global ranking are more influential in the global relations and positioned Western knowledge and epistemology are superior than others. 97 6.3 Petitions from ICL Students Although some ICL leaders suggested that removing the Latin motto on the coat of arms is an important step for ICL to redefine its modern values and address its historical legacy of British imperialism, not all people agreed that this decision was a good move, particularly some current students at ICL. The major debates I found were two petitions that some ICL students posted on Change.org to suggest ICL leaders bring the previous coat of arms back. In this section, I primarily analyze and discuss these two petitions that Imperial students wrote. 6.3.1 Everyone’s Opinions Matter? The first petition is titled “Imperial Crest – Reinstate, Reinterpret and Represent. Everyone's Opinion Matters”. The title of this petition indicated that the main idea of this petition is to ask ICL leaders to reinterpret the meaning of the Latin motto instead of just removing it. Besides, the title indicated that students felt their opinions were not engaged in the process of decision-making. In this petition, Imperial students (2020a) started with “Imperial is an amazing British university which has thriving global recognition. Its primary logo, the one used on all modern projects and publishes, matches the university’s scientific and academic reputation well”. Some Imperial students strengthened ICL’s global reputation, research and academic excellence with its linkage with the coat of arms. However, they did not mention where the reputation comes from. If the reputation comes from ICL’s great performance on global university ranking, Stack (2016) had noted that “the highest-ranking institutions – determined by the media – are richer, whiter, English speaking, and concentrated in Western Europe and North America” (p. 4), and ICL’s high rank, nevertheless, does not mean the institution has done well in addressing racial inequality and injustice since those are not 98 indicators in major global university rankings. Imperial students mentioned that they are proud of ICL’s scientific and academic reputation, nevertheless, as a White dominant institution in Western Europe where BAME faculty are relatively underrepresented, ICL's scientific and academic reputation is most likely achieved by White and male professors. Thus, arguing ICL’s reputation can be a discursive practice to perpetuate the dominant position of White and male faculty in the institution. Although reputation can come from a university’s academic performance, it is also necessary to look at a university’s work on disrupting White privilege and promoting racial equality and justice. In addition, by arguing ICL is “an amazing British university” (Imperial student, 2020a), students not only positioned Imperial College London as a prestigious higher education institution in the world but students who study at ICL, therefore, are positioned as elite students in the society. Nevertheless, these students did not notice and acknowledge that they can be a part of the problem of racial inequality at ICL and the larger society. Rather, being elite students means that they are benefiting from the current unequal system. As I have argued, students in this petition did not indicate which standards were referred to in terms of the reputation of ICL. Although Imperial students who made the claim might not aware of the power in their language, it is a powerful discursive practice that could help reinforce the assumption that universities like ICL are world-class universities while others are less prestigious or inferior, ICL students with White and wealthy backgrounds are social elites but others are positioned as inferior. Imperial students (2020a) in the petition described ICL's decision of removing the Latin motto as an "impulsive reaction" and they suggested that modernizing the meaning of the Latin motto and engaging more discussions with people within the ICL community were necessary. In addition, students (2020a) made a strong argument that "The college has actively addressed the 99 BLM movement, creating many sustainable opportunities which are only to be celebrated. However, we must remember that living in a democracy means 'everyone's opinion matters'". By saying that, students did not acknowledge that the murder of George Floyd could bring tremendous harm to Black faculty and students at ICL, rather, they argued that people should be happy about the measures that ICL leaders had proposed. However, as I have discussed, racial inequality is a systemic and ongoing problem that has no simple solutions, and the limited measures that ICL leaders proposed would have little impact on making structural reforms. In addition, the argument that "everyone's opinion matters" did not just reflect these Imperial students' dissatisfaction towards ICL leaders' lack of negotiation with students, rather, it is a strong argument against Black Lives Matter. The argument of everyone's opinion matters can be seen as a synonym of “All Lives Matter” which is used opposite to “Black Lives Matter” and it is arguably a racist argument. The slogan of Black Lives Matter was often used when Black people's lives were mistakenly or intentionally killed by White police to fight against anti-Black racism. Thus, it was very inappropriate at that time to say "All Lives Matter" because even though the argument itself might be reasonable, the intention for using "All Lives Matter" to respond to "Black Lives Matter" is improper and racist. Likewise, when the decision that ICL leaders made was to address anti-Black racism on campus and compensate for the pain that Black faculty and students suffered, it is rather inappropriate to say "everyone's opinions matter". Although it is reasonable to say that in a democracy, everyone's opinion matters, it is also important to note whether the democracy conforms to the principle of justice and equity. Imperial students (2020a) thereafter argued that it is healthier to “recognise the positives which were achieved, ensuring the mistakes of yesterday aren’t repeated”. Admittedly, ICL made scientific and academic achievements, but it does not mean ICL also made significant 100 contributions to social justice and racial equality. On the contrary, the structure of Whiteness in higher education could marginalize and devalue BAME faculty’s academic accomplishment and further reproduce racial inequality. Imperial students (2020a) suggested, "Let history rest and focus on the current world we live in, we need to stop living in the past and focus on building a future with purpose, equality and vision”. By saying “stop living in the past”, these Imperial students were arguing that they do not want to recognize the historical legacy of Imperialism of ICL and acknowledge the privilege that they benefit from the violent oppression of other people through colonization. Besides, if Imperial students did not realize their roles in reinforcing racial inequality at ICL and acknowledge ICL’s colonial past and present, it would be unlikely for them to work on challenging the colonial and racist structure of ICL and build an equitable and just future of ICL. Last but not least, Imperial students in this petition says: Imperial’s mission is to benefit society through excellence in science, engineering, medicine and business. This motto represented that at the time, its intentions were pure and the same ones we hold true today. Don’t let how we view things over 100 years on change what the motto stood, and still stands for today, science for all (Imperial student, 2020a). In this statement, these Imperial students argued that ICL's academic excellence in science, engineering, medicine and business can benefit society while they did not mention who would benefit through these studies or who would benefit more than others. In terms of the interpretation of the Latin motto, developing these fields is for the purpose of perpetuating the power of the British empire and expanding their colonization. Thus, I would not agree with the Imperial students' argument of "science for all", because science in the era of colonization did 101 not benefit all people, rather, it became a tool for colonization and in the postcolonial era, racism is embedded particularly in the STEM fields. Therefore, although Imperial students said they hope ICL to become a more diverse and inclusive institution for everyone, their reasoning in this petition for ICL leaders to bring the original coat of arms back did not indicate what they would actually do to contribute to racial equality at ICL. Instead, their arguments in this petition reflected that they did not realize the colonial structure of ICL and its ongoing and profound harmful impact on BAME people at ICL, and their language as the discursive practice could possibly perpetuate racial inequality at ICL and reinforce the assumption that the scientific and academic achievement of ICL is for the good of the society as a whole. 6.3.2 Harm ICL’s Historical Identity? Another petition titled “Keep the Imperial College motto” is also posted by anonymous ICL students. At the beginning of this petition, Imperial students (2020b) acknowledged that the murder of George Floyd reminded people of racial injustices in the U.K. They also appreciated ICL leaders’ new measures such as establishing a new scholarship to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the main purpose of writing this petition was to suggest that the decision to remove the Latin motto on the coat of arms "made by unknown members of the college's governing body" was controversial and they hoped to bring the original coat of arms back (Imperial student, 2020b). By saying the decision was made by the unknown members, these Imperial students were arguing that the decision-making process of scrapping the motto lacked transparency. Nevertheless, Provost Walmsley in his letter said "as future leaders, your ideas will help shape the College and the world in important ways" (Walmsley, 2020), in 102 fact, in this case, ideas from the ICL community were not well engaged and the process of decision-making was not explained clearly to the public. By saying that, I am not supporting students' opinions in this petition, rather, students did have the right to express their thoughts and know more about the rationales for removing the Latin motto, while in this case, ICL leaders did not do as what they have said. Imperial students further argued that this decision was “a good PR move for the college”, and they recognized “changing the motto of the college is a superficial way to fight racism” (Imperial student, 2020b). However, in the petition, Imperial students did not propose any thoughts on challenging racism at ICL. Rather, their arguments of maintaining the motto romanticized the historical role of the British empire. For instance, these Imperial students (2020b) suggested that the motto could have a positive interpretation such as “science serving to protect individuals within the empire from external threats” and they used Britain’s contribution in World War II as an example to interpret this translation. Specifically, Imperial students argued When the Latin motto was invented in the early 20th century, Britain stood before two world wars. The second world war was fought against a racist and genocidal regime. Scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of penicillin helped Britain to win the war and stop fascism (Imperial student, 2020b). Interestingly, World War II took place during the years of 1939 -1945 while the coat of arms was granted to ICL in 1908, which was much earlier than World War II. In this case, I argued that Imperial students in this petition abused history to romanticize the British empire. Regardless of the time that World War II took place, it is still not an appropriate example to argue the British empire was fighting for justice. Although Imperial students noticed that Britain was fighting against Nazi Germany, they overlooked the fact that Britain was also allied with one of the 103 greatest tyrants of the twentieth century – Joseph Stalin, and one of the intentions for Britain to join World War II was to protect their colonies and vested interest rather than opposing to fascism (MacMillian, 2009). By romanticizing the past of Britain, these Imperial students did not fully acknowledge the colonial past of the country and ICL, instead, they used the "positive" interpretations of the motto and the British empire to justify their reasoning for remaining the original coat of arms. Besides, changing the interpretation of the motto would not change the colonial nature of the coat of arms and the motto, but positively reinterpreting the motto was to romanticize the colonial past of the country and had its risk to cover up the colonial present of the institution and thus reproduce racial inequality. Imperial students (2020b) also argued that it is important to keep the Latin motto because this motto is connected with ICL's historical identity, and "Remembering uncomfortable truths about the British empire through artifacts such as the motto, is important in the current struggle against systemic racism". I agree that it is important to remember uncomfortable truths and fight against systemic racism but what is missing here is that these Imperial students did not explain why the Latin motto could remind people of an uncomfortable history. What has been said in the petition is that the Latin motto can be reinterpreted to a positive version while changing the interpretation of the Latin motto does not necessarily help people to think of the brutal history of colonization. Rather, as I have argued, romanticizing the Latin motto and the colonial history of Britain might reimagine ICL as a diverse and inclusive place and reinforce and reproduce systemic racism and its colonial patterns. Besides, these Imperial students did not mention how they, as current ICL students, might contribute to fighting against systemic racism, but what they had demanded in the petition was to ask ICL leaders to keep the original coat of arms without explaining why remaining the Latin motto could help against systemic racism at ICL. They 104 further claimed that "Forgetting the origins of the college will undoubtedly lead the college to lose a part of its historical identity" (Imperial student, 2020b). Nevertheless, what is absent in this claim is what exactly are the origins of the college? And the origins and historical identity of the college could include imperialism and colonization, but the institution's colonial past and colonial present were not acknowledged in the petition. By suggesting ICL leaders positively reinterpret the colonial motto, some students were denying or disguising the colonial past of ICL and refusing to make structural reforms to challenge the ongoing colonial and racist patterns at ICL. 6.4 Discussions After a series of controversial issues took place, particularly George Floyd's death and a new wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, leaders at University College London decided to remove the Latin motto on its coat of arms as one of the measures to tackle racial inequality. However, some ICL students did not support this decision and argued that this change is just a superficial move. In this section, I draw on theoretical frameworks that have been introduced in Chapter 4 to further discuss this controversial decision. Specifically, I drew on "non-performativity" to discuss some possible reasons and implications for ICL leaders to decide on removing the Latin motto. And I drew on cultural capital and theory of interest convergence to discuss some Imperial students’ different opinions reflected on their petitions. 6.4.1 A Non-performative Change As I have introduced in the background section, racism is not new in British higher education, especially in these Russell Group universities including Imperial College London 105 where BAME students and faculty are in particular underrepresented. Rather, institutional racism and White privilege have been perpetuated in British higher education and embedded in the structures of these universities. Therefore, it is important to look at why ICL leaders decided to remove the Latin motto in June 2020, rather than other times. Also, why removing the Latin motto has become the first measure to tackle racial inequalities proposed by ICL leaders? As Provost Walmsley (2020) mentioned in his letter sent to the ICL community, he mentioned that it was because of the murder of George Floyd and the new wave of the Black Lives Matter movement that triggered ICL leaders to put forward some measures to tackle racial inequalities at ICL, and removing the Lattin motto was the first step. However, before the murder of George Floyd, anti-Asian racism that intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic had also become a concern among students with Asian backgrounds. On March 9, 2020, in a news article reported by MyLondon, some Chinese ICL students already expressed their concerns that wearing masks would bring racist abuse to them (Sheppard, 2020, March 09). Nevertheless, the announcements that ICL leaders made did not mention anti-Asian racism and its impact on ICL students with Asian backgrounds and a prospective new scholarship and a new outreach program are exclusively targeting Black students (Evanson & Scheuber, 2020, June 5). Given the social and political environment, external and internal anti-racism activism pushed ICL leadership to work on addressing racism, but the work they have done and the plans they had proposed were, to some extent, limited. Racism does not equal to anti-Black racism, there are all types of racism targeting different racial groups, but the plans that ICL leadership proposed were exclusively targeting anti-Black racism due to the pressure from the BLM movement. However, other types of racism in ICL and the British society, particularly anti-Asian racism which was recently intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, was not involved in the plans. 106 By arguing the change of removing the Latin motto as a non-performative change, I first looked at the coat of arms itself. As I have analyzed in "The Coat of Arms" section, only removing the Latin motto would not change the colonial nature of the coat of arms. First, the Latin word – "SCIENTIA" meaning knowledge that remains on the coat of arms has not yet been clarified, and at ICL, knowledge particularly refers to science, medicine and business, in other words, Western and scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, positioning Western knowledge as neutral and universal is also a colonial perspective that devalued other knowledge and ways of knowing. In addition, the remaining image on the coat of arms of ICL is also adopted from the Royal coat of arms of the U.K., which reflected the historical legacy of the British empire and the colonial power and oppression of other peoples. Therefore, the entire coat of arms of ICL is inherently colonial, and simply removing the Latin motto does not change the colonial nature of the coat of arms, rather, it served as a PR move to show the public who might not know the coat of arms well that the university leaders were working on addressing racial inequalities but made no institutional change. Updating the institutional logo is a great starting point for university leaders to make non-performative changes because visual change could be more visible to the public. Compared to other measures such as launching a new scholarship and establishing a new outreach program for Black students, making a visual change was easier and more visible to the public. Therefore, rather than implementing other measures first, removing the Latin motto as the first step to address racism might help ICL leaders relieve pressure from the BLM movement and declare to the public that the value of ICL is anti-racism, equity, and inclusion. Nevertheless, removing the Latin motto and proposing limited plans to address racial injustice would not make ICL a less racist and more diverse and inclusive institution, and would fail to interrupt Whiteness and racial 107 inequalities. 6.4.2 Cultural Capital and Students’ Petitions The two petitions written by some ICL students indicated that there were a number of students at ICL who did not support ICL leaders' decision of removing the Latin motto on the coat of arms and they asked ICL leaders to consider keeping the original coat of arms. In this section, I drew on Bourdieu’s cultural capital and Bell’s theory of interest convergence to explain why these students might hold different opinions. In the petitions, ICL students argued that removing the Latin motto would harm the historical identity of ICL. However, the identity that these students strengthened in the petitions was not the colonial past of ICL but ICL's academic and scientific contributions. However, this framing erased that many of its academic and scientific contributions are not separate but are entangled with its colonial past. Therefore, rather than harming the historical identity of ICL, it would probably be more appropriate to argue that ICL students were saying changing the ICL coat of arms would harm their prestigious identity as ICL students. In other words, these ICL students’ prestigious identities were harmed because the cultural capital that ICL students could obtain is derived from the brand and value of the institution. According to Bourdieu (1986), cultural capital as a form of capital can exist in institutionalized state that can be represented as academic qualifications – "a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture" (p. 20). Although the academic qualification granted by Imperial College London would not become less prestigious and competitive after changing a coat of arms, looking at the updated coat of arms was “defaced” reflected that these ICL students perceived their cultural capital of having the identity of ICL 108 students was harmed. Their petitions, as a discursive practice, did not challenge racial inequality at ICL, rather, reinforced the assumption that ICL as a prestigious institution has significant cultural capital to grant to its students and perceived their identity as social elites. It is also important to look at why some students in the petitions welcomed other measures but only not satisfied the change of the coat of arms. In terms of cultural capital, I suggested that these students might perceive other measures would not hurt their interest and their identity as elite students. On one hand, establishing a new scholarship and outreach program to support Black students would bring more resource and offer more opportunities for Black students. On the other hand, there are possibilities that these measures might reproduce harm. For instance Black students who access the resources grant by a White institution might be perceived as “fortunate recipients” of “benevolence” or “charity”, and “the logic of development ultimately has roots in the colonial logics of the dominant global imaginary, and continues to position the Western subject against its racialized and Indigenous” (Stein & Andreotti, 2015, p. 234) . In that sense, inviting more Black students to join the structure of colonization and Whiteness at ICL and learn Western knowledge might further perpetuate and reproduce White supremacy and racial inequality. Besides, promoting these measures could reinforce ICL’s commitment to anti-racism and promote diversity excellence which might also serve as a rebranding technology to attract more students and revenue for the institution. 109 Chapter 7: Conclusion In this thesis, I explored the rationales and implications for leadership at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London chose to update their institutional logos. I also looked at debates and tensions around the changes at HLS and ICL from people with different perspectives. Particularly, I analyzed how leaders at HLS and ICL chose updating their institutional logos as an approach to respond to internal and external pressure of anti-racist activism, and how people challenged and perpetuated inequalities at HLS and ICL through looking at discourses. This study provided alternative thoughts on how branding work can be used other than marketing purposes, in particular, I looked at how leadership at two institutions used updating their institutional logos to respond to anti-racism activism, and at the same time, promote diversity and inclusion excellence. The “non-performativity” of anti-racism and diversity work in higher education provided a theoretical framework to argue that the decisions of updating university logos alone were not substantive to challenge systemic racism embedded at HLS and ICL. In addition, interest convergence, as one tenet of Critical Race Theory, was used as an analytical lens to study whether university leaders’ decisions on changing logos were aiming to address systemic racism on campus or were the decisions were made also because they were important for university leadership’s own interest for promoting institutional brands with values of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion? To answer my research questions, I drew on Critical Discourse Analysis as the methodology to analyze the connections between language and power. I looked at who and what were present and absent in discourses used in the decision-making process of changing institutional logos by people with different perceptions. Specifically, I analyzed how leaders and 110 students at HLS and ICL framed differently on the changes of logos. I also looked at how people acknowledged the colonial past and present in their institutions and to what extent did they acknowledge their own roles and privileges in maintaining inequalities. In this chapter, I provided final summaries of research findings, conclusions, discussions, and some recommendations for future research. 7.1 Summary of the Research and Findings 7.1.1 Research Question 1 My first research question asked how did leadership at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London explain their reasons for rebranding their institutional logos? One of the major findings through my analysis showed that racism is not new in Western higher education institutions, but leadership at HLS and ICL tend to respond to racism when there was a certain pressure. At HLS, Dean Martha Minow explained the reason for retiring the shield was because the shield associated with the Royall family’s history of slavery did not reflect HLS’s current values and commitment to justice and equality (Minow & Chu, 2016). Likewise, at ICL, provost Ian Walmsley (2020) noted that the murder of George Floyd and the BLM movement instigated a call to action for ICL to tackle racial inequality and injustice. Leadership at ICL explained that the decision of removing the Latin motto on the coat of arms was followed by feedback from the Imperial community and the new coat of arms could better reflect ICL's "culture, values and commitment to supporting a diverse and inclusive community" (Evanson & Scheuber, 2020, June 5). However, it is important to note that racism is not new in Western higher education, but leaders at HLS and ICL decided to update their institutional logos soon after the Royall Must Fall movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. This thesis argued that the intention for 111 HLS and ICL leaders’ decisions of updating their institutional logos primarily served as a PR strategy to lessen pressure from anti-racism activism. At HLS, student activists urged university leaders to remove the shield, but Dean Minow did not take action to discuss issues related to the controversial shield until the black tape incident happened. Internal pressure from the students-led movement and the racist incident pushed HLS leaders to respond to issues around racism. At ICL, similarly, not until the murder of George Floyd and another wave of the BLM movement, did ICL leaders stand out to make announcements about their commitment to anti-racism, diversity and inclusion and new measurements to tackle anti-Black racism. In other words, it was probably not HLS and ICL leaders' initial intention to address racial issues at their institutions, rather, under the pressure of anti-racist activism, university leaders were pushed to demonstrate to the public that their institutions were working on anti-racism and attend to become more diverse and inclusive so as to relieve the pressure and keep business as usual. The second major finding showed that updating institutional logos alone could be a “performative” but non-performative action to address racial inequalities. Although changing a logo is a “performative” change as branding, it could be an non-performative change on addressing racism. In other words, the “performative” change of logos might serve to improve an institutional brand, but updating university logos alone would not make an institution less racist and more diverse. it is more important to look at whether university leaders have made substantive reforms to challenge the racist structures of their universities. In addition, based on the theory of interest convergence, this thesis argued that removing or updating racist logos were inadequate and non-performative for people who are historically underrepresented at HLS and ICL, but this action could serve the interest of university leadership. HLS and ICL leaders agreed to change the logos because the interest of leadership and activists converged at that point. 112 Specifically, by satisfying the demands from activists, university leaders at HLS and ICL could also benefit from updating the logos. Not only the pressure from activists and the public could be relieved but an improved brand stands for equity, diversity, and inclusion might be useful to convince the public that the university is now more diverse and inclusive. And the branding efforts might further attract more fee-paying students and generate more revenue for the university. 7.1.2 Research Question 2 My second research question asked how was the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion used in the rebranding process at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, and to what extent did leadership acknowledge the institutions’ colonial and racist past and present? Through my analysis, leadership at HLS and ICL extensively used the language of anti-racism, diversity and inclusion in their documents, announcements, and statements that related to the rebranding decisions. However, my finding suggested that saying the institutions are committed to anti-racism, diversity and inclusion does not mean there were structural changes to address racism in their institutions. In addition, although leaders at HLS and ICL acknowledged their institutions’ colonial and racist past, they did not fully acknowledge the fact that their institutions are still largely influenced by ongoing racism and colonialism. Activists who pushed for the change of logos had a goal of addressing the present racism in the institutions, but leadership framed the issue of logos from the lens of the institutions’ colonial and racist past. In fact, updating institutional logos at HLS and ICL had served as a technology to avoid acknowledging their institution's colonial and racist present and proposing new institutional logos had even become a simple solution to claim their institutional values of equalities, 113 diversity and inclusion. 7.1.3 Research Question 3 My third research question asked what were the debates and tensions around the updates of institutional logos at Harvard Law School and Imperial College London? The overarching debate around the change of institutional logos was whether HLS should remove the shield and ICL should remove the Latin motto on the coat of arms. A major finding in relation to this research question is that students can be a force to challenge inequalities in higher education but they can also maintain inequalities at some point. At HLS, based on previous findings and discussions about the association between the shield of HLS and the Royall family's coat of arms, some students at HLS organized an activist group – Royall Must Fall – to demand leaders at Harvard remove the shield. Student activists extensively used social media and launched campaigns on campus to demonstrate their stance that the shield reflected the Royall family's history of slavery should be removed, and their actions were argued as anti-racism. On the contrary, after ICL removed its Latin motto on the coat of arms, some students wrote and signed petitions to request leaders at ICL to consider bringing the previous coat of arms back. Although some Imperial students in their petitions maintained that they also support racial equality, by analyzing what has been said and what was absent in their petitions through Critical Discourse Analysis, these students positioned themselves as elites and hope to maintain their vested interest of being elite students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Even though, in the petitions, these Imperial students pointed out that revising the coat of arms as a way to address racism is superficial and is just a PR move, they did not acknowledge that although changing the coat of arms was inadequate to challenge racism, it probably better 114 than doing nothing and keep business as usual . Instead, some Imperial students provided their reasoning that the ICL coat of arms reflected the history and reputation of ICL and changing the coat of arms would hurt the identity of the College. Furthermore, these students suggested that their opinions on changing the coat of arms were not engaged by the university leaders and they argued a better way than removing the motto was to redefine the meaning of the motto to be adaptable to the current values of ICL. This reasoning did not indicate that students on the petition had the will to change the status quo and challenge racial inequalities at ICL, but showed that they enjoyed certain privileges and would like the university to keep business as usual. However, in the petitions, students did not appropriately acknowledge the colonial past and present at ICL and themselves as part of the problem of racial injustice. Another important debate was whether keeping the original institutional logo is a better way for remembering the violent and colonial foundations of the institutions. This study did not examine whether keeping or removing the original logos is a better approach to respond to racism. Rather, this study argued that, it is more important to look at whether the institution’s colonial past and present were appropriately acknowledged and whether institutional changes to fight racial inequalities and create a more diverse and inclusive campus environment were made. 7.2 Reflection on the Study While conducting this research, many things surprised me. Before reading some background stories of logo changes in higher education institutions, I thought this thesis would completely be a study on the topic of branding and marketing in higher education. However, as I read more, I was surprised to find that in addition to promoting an institutional brand, updating a university logo can also be used as a PR strategy to respond to pressures from the university 115 community and the public. Another point that surprised me was that university logos can carry the history and foundations of a university and logos that have been used for decades can be very controversial nowadays. In this study, the HLS shield reflected its association with the history of Black slavery and the coat of arms of ICL indicated the colonial past of the British Empire. In this sense, a logo is not just a symbol, but sometimes it reflects the history and values of a university, and how universities interpret the meanings of their logos and how to deal with logos that involve controversial elements also reflect the values that the university stands for and to what extent do people in the university community acknowledge the institution’s colonial past and present. I also felt surprised that it was not always the university leaders’ plan to change or remove the logo, instead, the case of Harvard Law School illuminated that student activists can also play an important role in impelling university leaders to make a decision. Despite that, it is also important to look at the rationales and implications of why changes often happened on tokenistic perspectives such as logos, advocated by students and university leaders, but when advocating for free tuition, the results were completely different. Surprisingly, even though changing logos is analyzed in this thesis as an inadequate measure to address racial injustice, analysis of the fierce debates on the logos illuminated the difficulty and complexity of challenging systemic racism in Western higher education due to the resistance from university administrations and others who are very likely predominant in the institution but do not see themselves as problems in the current unequal higher education systems. I also reflected that there were some challenges in doing this study that were unexpected. As I have mentioned, in the proposal stage of this study, I thought I would focus on branding in higher education from the lens of university logos and its connection with internationalization of higher education. For example, the impact of changing logos on attracting international students. 116 Nevertheless, the novel coronavirus outbroke in Vancouver BC at my final stage of writing the research proposal, thus it became less likely for me to conduct interviews or distribute questionnaires. Therefore, I switched my focus to logo and anti-racism. However, given my position as an international student from China, where the majority of the population in the province I live are Han Chinese, and protests were almost impossible to take place in the authoritarian regime, it was quite challenging and overwhelming for me to do a study on the topic of anti-racism and activism. Unexpectedly, the global pandemic reinforced anti-Asian racism, the death of George Floyd and a new wave of Black Lives Matters took place while I was conducting this research. So the topic of my study became more timely and significant. Although these events were tragic, they made me realized that racism and discrimination is so real in Western society and has a significant impact on racialized, Indigenous, and other underrepresented people. As an international student of color in Canada and a graduate student in higher education studies, writing this thesis provided me with a great opportunity to not just train my research skills but study and critique higher education leaders and university students’ roles in anti-racism through branding. 7.3 Contributions of this Study The major contribution of this study is to provide alternative ways of thinking branding in higher education and students' roles in challenging and maintaining racial injustice on media. In the era of academic capitalism, branding work has been conventionally understood as a strategy to promote institutional brands of excellence, distinguish a university from others, become more competitive in the higher education market and attract more fee-paying students and thus generate more revenue for the institution. This study provides an alternative perspective of 117 looking at higher education branding as a PR move to respond to anti-racist activism, and conceptually, this study further complicated and problematized the concept of branding in higher education. Specifically, the PR move of rebranding might attract the attention of the public to focus on a university logo rather than institutional change. Besides, some higher education leaders’ discursive practices of extensively using the language of diversity and inclusion potentially helped the public to reimagine the values and realities at these institutions are anti-racist, diverse, and inclusive, but further perpetuate Whiteness, racism on campus and reproduce inequalities. This study also made the contribution to shed light on students’ roles in challenging and maintaining inequalities and elite identities in higher education on media. In some circumstances, students can play proactive roles in calling attention to addressing racism and advocating for racial justice in higher education. In other situations, through discursive practices, some students were maintaining their elite identities and perpetuating the status quo of inequalities in the institution. This study sheds some light on the fact of the complexities of students' roles and perspectives in higher education reform. Specifically, there are students from a more critical position who can act as a force to challenge the status quo of inequalities and students from a more conservative position could play the role of the resistance to change. While even those who are advocating for change can also be implicated in hard. This study invites people in higher education, particularly students to reflect on their positions and actions in challenging and/or perpetuating systemic racism embedded in Western higher education. 118 7.4 Suggestions for Future Studies In this study, I only looked at two cases, Harvard Law School and Imperial College London, and due to the relatively limited scope of this study, the findings might not be able to overgeneralize to other universities' rebranding work, particularly, change of logos. Therefore, I suggest that future researchers who might be interested in university logos and branding work can look at other universities' rebranding of logos but not limited to Western universities. Also, because updating university logos is just one of the examples in the larger contexts of rebranding, future research might also look at other examples such as renaming a faculty or building and removing a statue on campus to further expand understanding on the other possibilities for the rationales and implications of higher education rebranding. Although I looked at university logos in this study, I did not specifically analyze the content on the logos such as the meanings of the elements and the use of colors due to lack of expertise. As Metcalfe (2016) argued we could neglect institutional phenomena and human behaviors without visual research methods, and visual research methods can enlarge our understanding of contemporary academic environments, Therefore, researchers who have expertise in art history or visual methods can study university logos per se, particularly those universities that have updated their logos. Coding visual data might bring new insights and expand understanding of higher education As I have discussed in the methodology chapter, Critical Discourse Analysis has its limitations, and beyond visual research methods, interviews can be applied to this research topic to investigate unpacked insights on updating university logos. For example, I could not identify the positionalities of people who participated in the process of updating the logos or offered a variety of opinions around the change. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Educational Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Stack, Michelle, 1967-
Rethinking branding in higher education : updating institutional logos in response to anti-racist activism
Text