"As Diverse as Possible": How Universities Compromise Multiracial Identities.

This article examines how U.S. colleges and universities, exemplified by Western University, navigate and represent the identities of multiracial-identifying students amid increasing institutional emphasis on racial diversity. Despite Western’s relatively high proportion of multiracial students and inclusion of a "two or more races" category, university practices often recast or marginalize multiracial identities into monoracial frameworks through organizational decisions in campus events, community centers, dormitories, and administrative processes. Multiracial students perceive their identities as both a challenge to institutional categorization and a resource leveraged by the university to enhance its appearance of diversity, leading some to question or alter their self-identification. The study highlights a broader tension in higher education between evolving multiracial demographics and entrenched monoracial diversity paradigms, suggesting that universities’ current approaches contribute to ambiguous and compromised understandings of multiracial identities.