In their paper, Nicole Philippczyck (TU Ilmenau), Jan Grundmann (University of Erfurt) and Simon Oertel (University of Salzburg /TU Ilmenau) investigate factors influencing the design of diversity statements on the websites of European universities.
Their study was published in the journal Minerva (https://www.springer.com/journal/11024/). Minvera has an Impact Factor of 2.3 (2022) and a 5-Year Impact Factor of 2.9, according to Clarivate Analytics. The journal is dedicated to the exploration of ideas, traditions, cultures, and institutions in the fields of science, higher education, and research, and includes historical and contemporary as well as global and local issues.
Nicole Philippczyck, Jan Grundmann, and Simon Oertel take up these perspectives in their paper by examining the role of institutional founding conditions and institutional heritage for the self-representation of European higher education institutions in relation to diversity. In doing so, they use web scraping and quantitative text analysis to analyze the self-representations of 374 higher education institutions in the form of websites in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. They distinguish between a more idealistic approach and a more market-oriented approach to diversity. Their results show that the foundational stage has no significant effect on the likelihood that a university will focus on a market-oriented understanding of diversity. However, they observe an imprinting effect on the adoption of a diversity explanation in general and an equality-oriented explanation. Furthermore, their findings indicate that the socialist legacy of universities in Central and Eastern European countries continues to influence their understanding of diversity today.
Link to publication: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09507-x