Acknowledgements

*

An earlier version of this essay was presented at a meeting of the Language and Culture Workshop at the University of Chicago in May 1998. My thanks to the workshop attendees for their input, especially Daniel Suslak and Michael Silverstein. My particular thanks to Doug Glick for his careful reading of and lengthy comments on that version.

Notes

1. See Silverstein 1976 and elsewhere. Purposive function-1 is distinguished from indexical function-2 in that the latter is about the complex, indeterminate, realtime, not-always-planned-on outcome of communicative action. For example, this essay is a sort of functional-2 outcome of recruiting discourses.
2. Objectification and fetishizing seem to be operant terms for what U.S. News does, as the following excerpt suggests:

   Our overall system rests on two pillars. First it relies on quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality. Second, the rankings are based on our impartial views of what matters in education; individual colleges tend to overemphasize their particular strengths as they compete to enroll the best students . . . The method that U.S. News uses to rank colleges and universities consists of three basic steps. The colleges are categorized by their mission and region, and we gather data from each on up to 16 indicators of academic excellence. Each factor is assigned a weight that reflects our judgment about how much each measure matters. Finally the colleges in each category are ranked against their peers, based on their composite weighted score. (Graham and Morse 2000: 2)

   Note the rather smug way in which this publication has arrogated to itself the aura of Consumer Report.
3. For this paper, I use these terms as if equivalent but they are not quite. Multiculturalism is used in conjunction with the five racial or quasi-racial categories instituted by the Office of Management and Budget for affirmative action statistics; see discussion later in this paper of the college application form. Diversity includes this but can also include gender identities other than strictly heterosexual and sometimes includes international students. See Urciuoli 1999:289.
4. Selections from the president's letters to the college community.
5. Hamilton College, The Collected Stories 1996-97, p.5.
6. A college's multicultural profile is not part of the ranking system but a quick glance at the top 25 liberal arts slots (actually 26 colleges) in the 1998 America's Best Colleges (pp.76-77) shows a clear numerical distinction between the top 5 and the rest: schools 1-5 show 69%, 69%, 59%, 74%, 57% white populations. After that, and not in a neat progression, there are 2 in the 60s, 7 in the 70s, 10 in the 80s and 2 in the 90s. Clearly, something is going on with those 5 top-ranked schools which indicates how the quantification of multiculturalism has become an important element in college advertising. This inference is supported by the ways in which admissions people talk about students being desirable because they "bring (or have) diversity." There really is no other way for admissions people to deploy the multiculturalism taxonomy. The numbers are becoming an important if thus far informal index of competitiveness in the rankings, so what matters about the terms designating the taxa is not their semantic richness but their countability. This leaves a situation in which the semantics gets filled by the nature of student life, including race/class assumptions that students and faculty bring with them from the larger society. So the markedness remains unchallenged.
7. Michael Silverstein (personal communication, 5/98) coined this term. I had originally used the term strategically empty signifiers, focusing on what seemed to me a denotative vagueness; Silverstein pointed out that the key quality of these terms was the strategically indexical ways in which they were deployed.
8. I am a little uneasy using the term shifter here, given its customary usage as a referring index encoded as a grammatical morpheme or function word, e.g. tense or deictic marker. Still, SDSs, like shifters, operate "at the levels of code and message simultaneously" and have "referential value . . . [which] depends on the presupposition of its pragmatic value" (Silverstein 1976: 24). I could dub them strategically deployable indexes, yielding the initials SDI which has a nice 80s Star Wars ring to it.
9. Faculty minutes 9/20/96
10. Congruent with the president's assessment of diversity as "vital to the education of citizens and the development of leaders" is a strategy used by recruiters who believe that smart white students will choose a place with "a lot of diversity" because that reflects how they see themselves as good citizens. Diversity, like skills or leadership becomes something an individual can possess to get ahead in the world, and therefore it is something the school can sell.
11. A favorite phrase of Taylor's and the title of Robert Kanigel's 1997 biography of Taylor.

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