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The Impossibility of a Color-Blind Identity

Shifting Social Identities from the Margin to the Center of Our Understanding of How Historically Marginalized Students Experience Campus Life

Some individuals use identity to refer to a core sense of self, composed of valued personal characteristics such as goals, personality style, intellectual abilities, and other private opinions of one’s self.¹ This core sense of self is believed to be stable across contexts. Others use identity to refer to the roles people play in society, such as student, employee, athlete, and sibling.² As expected, one’s identity roles are contextual. Identity can also refer to the social groups with which one identifies, such as gender, race-ethnicity, national origin, and social class.³ It is this latter definition that is the focus of this book. Although this chapter focuses on racial-ethnic identity, much of what is discussed would be true of other marginalized social identities.

To some extent, simple demographics predestine particular American racial-ethnic groups to be minorities on college campuses, but the marginalization that Black and Latinx students experience is an institutionally constructed phenomenon. To be minoritized is to be a member of a group that is both less in number and has less power and more stigma than other groups. Karolyn Tyson argues that it is the combination of being both in the demographic minority and negatively stereotyped—having to interact with peers and professors who hold racialized stereotypes about academic potential—that leads Black and Latinx students in historically White colleges and universities to experience marginalization in ways that implicate both their racial-ethnic and academic identities.⁴

Throughout this book, identity is used to refer to both identity (the way we see ourselves), and identification (the way others see us). These internal and external aspects of identity cannot be separated or interchanged. Simply matching the characteristics of a particular racial-ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, or other social group is not enough to determine whether and in which contexts an individual will claim that social identity. For example, there were times during the interviews when Julissa clearly identified as Black and liked being identified as one of the “Black representatives on campus.” This occurred when she discussed her leadership roles in the predominantly White campus organizations. However, she also actively rejected being seen as just another member of the “Black community” on campus, a community that she stereotyped as “entitled,” “not inclusive,” “[without] school spirit,” and low achieving. This one social identity—Black American—is associated with different stereotypes, roles, and opportunities, depending on the context in which it is evoked.

Julissa claims her Black identity in contexts when she is the rare Black member of a campus leadership organization because in those contexts it comes with stereotypes of “Black exceptionalism”—White validation of a Black person whose success is held up as atypical of the Black collective. However, this is a fragile Black identity that must continually be defended, because as soon as she exits spaces in which she is identified as exceptional, she returns to being just another Black student on campus.

The challenge is that buying into Black exceptionalism legitimizes respectability politics—the extent to which the success of Black individuals hinges on their ability to distinguish themselves in socially respectable, nonthreatening ways.⁵

The Transition to Historically White Colleges and Universities

The transition to college is accompanied by a considerable number of stressors, such as adapting to new classwork expectations, creating new social networks, managing independence, and identifying career pathways. Racial-ethnic minority students have the added burden of navigating racialized interpersonal stressors in their interactions with peers, faculty, and administrators. We usually focus on racialized stressors that come from intergroup interactions, and particularly interactions between White Americans and members of minority groups.⁶ However, racialized stressors can also occur among peers of one’s own group in the form of identity insults such as the “acting White” accusation.⁷ Santiago, a Latinx male student attending Suburban StateU, had this experience of being called out for “betraying” his culture because the peer group he related to most was not of his racial-ethnic origin.

This means that minority students navigate both intragroup and intergroup racialized stressors, which tax their cognitive, emotional, and physiological energies and undermine their ability to focus on academics. The result is that race-ethnicity continues to matter in determining student success in college. Compounding this stress is that minority students are often placed in the position of feeling it necessary to prove that race-ethnicity continues to matter in these supposedly post-racial college contexts. Despite the beliefs of many faculty and administrators, research contradicts the idea that intellectualism is enough to overcome long-held prejudices. Toon Kuppens and Russell Spears show that as people gain education, their explicit, deliberative racial-ethnic biases decline substantially, but not their implicit, intuitive biases.⁸ Kuppens and Spears conclude that individuals with higher levels of education are more likely to “genuinely endorse racial equality, but nevertheless carry spontaneous negative evaluations of, or associations about Blacks.”⁹ This “unintentional” discrimination is as consequential as intentional discrimination.¹⁰

I have seen firsthand the indignant response among faculty when I argue that race-ethnicity continues to matter. They quickly claim that they judge only ideas, not the cultural frame of a particular idea, and they definitely do not judge the social status of the individual presenting a particular idea. Such statements reflect the belief that if one does not personally engage in blatant and overt acts of discrimination, then race-ethnicity is not an issue, at least not within one’s sphere of influence.¹¹ This need to call discrimination and racism things of the past was evident in claims that Barack Obama’s elections was proof that the United States had arrived at a post-racial state of consciousness. Ironically, the years immediately after this claim evidenced an increase in racist events.¹² What has lingered from post-racial arguments is the idea that foregrounding race-ethnicity perpetuates racism, the argument being that if we want racism to disappear, we must first ignore the existence of race-ethnicity.

Instead, I argue that ignoring the existence of race-ethnicity reduces a significant aspect of people’s lived experiences as meaningless and denies the profound effect that it has on their sense of self. This denies racialized students—students marked by stigmatized embodied characteristics such as skin tone, hair texture, language, and accent—opportunities for critical discourse aimed at reorganizing existing racial-ethnic stereotypes, and it denies them opportunities to create new, transformative understandings of race-ethnicity.

Racialization of the American College Campus

Racialization can be thought of as a relational process, a combination of dynamic social and psychological processes, that places people into distinct racial groups and then becomes internalized as identity.¹³ This perspective is in keeping with the belief that race has no biological basis and is instead made real and consequential through social positioning. Critical race theorists like Bonilla Silva argue that it is because race is a social concept that is embedded in hierarchical interpersonal interaction, rather than a physiological concept that is genetically distinct and biologically measurable, that it has maintained its significance in the face of evidence against its biological reality.¹⁴

During orientation week, most incoming racial-ethnic minority students are shocked to realize just how few of them there are on campus, particularly for students who attended diverse high schools. Sharon, a Black, female, first-year student at Rural StateU who attended a diverse high school (36 percent Latinx, 28 percent Black, and 25 percent White), was surprised to realize that she was not going to have the same mix of friends as in high school. Rural StateU’s campus was only 5 percent Black and 8 percent Latinx.

Many students had experiences similar to Sharon’s. Several also noted how White students frequently assumed they were lower class, which added yet another barrier to building diverse peer networks.

Today, historically White colleges and universities have a student body that is, on average, about 9 percent Black and 13 percent Latinx. Even so, more than one-third of Latinx and Black students attend colleges that are less than 4 percent Black or Latinx¹⁵—institutions where they are often the lone representative of their group in class, in the dining hall, on the floor of their dorm, and in the clubs they join. Being such a small fraction of the student body is itself a racial- ethnic identity challenge and a challenge to one’s sense of belonging at the institution.¹⁶ Racial-ethnic minority students also quickly notice that they are not well represented—and sometimes even completely absent—among the faculty. That said, it is about much more than lack of representation among the students, faculty, and staff. Racialization is about social positioning; Black and Latinx individuals are often overrepresented among the service staff, so much so that students report being mistaken for service staff when not displaying clear markers of their student status. Latinx and Black students also move through campuses filled with named buildings, murals, statues, and portraits celebrating those who amassed their wealth by colonizing and oppressing their ancestors and ancestral lands. It should come as no surprise, then, that research consistently shows that Black and Latinx students continue to experience racial-ethnic microaggressions and feelings of isolation on campus.¹⁷

Julissa’s Story

In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “I feel most [Black] when I am thrown against a sharp White background… . I feel my race.” In 2018, that description still captures Julissa’s experiences at Rural StateU. In fact, much of what research tells us about the significance of racial-ethnic identity for marginalized youth navigating White spaces is evident in Julissa’s story.¹⁸ We will see that Rural StateU structured false choices between her academic identity and her Black identity, and false choices between inclusion in the Black community and inclusion in the broader campus community.

Julissa is an only child to working-class parents who had her later in life. She was motivated by their sacrifices to ensure her bright future, such as how hard they labored to move out of a dangerous Chicago neighborhood to a more stable northern suburb. “Things got a little too rough for me, I would say, growing up,” she said. “You know, living in a house where you see people constantly running down the side of your house being chased by law enforcement.” Moving to the suburbs and enrolling in a science and technology magnet high school gave her access to educational opportunities and a college-going peer group that paved her pathway to college. In particular, seeing her classmates struggle during high school, “and then signing up to struggle again [for] four [more] years kinda motivated me to go to college and ultimately end up at [Rural StateU] with them. So I guess, you know, that peer support group kind of steered me in the right direction.”

Research tells us that peer support for college can be more important than an individual student’s record of academic achievements.¹⁹ In Julissa’s case, her parents’ belief that education was the way to ensure a brighter future, coupled with her own desire for a better future, formed the base of her drive to go to college.

This belief that college is the way to a better financial future, coupled with the awareness that job loss, foreclosure, and bankruptcy left her parents struggling, propelled Julissa’s unceasing drive to both get in and find a way to pay for college. Knowing there would be little financial support, she took it on herself. “Imagine doing sixty-one different applications with two or three different essay prompts,” she said. But it paid off. She received “a lot of scholarships,” and college was fully funded. She was also able to send her parents a couple hundred dollars each month to help with their rent.

But the demands of college coursework were still a shock. “I started struggling around maybe the fifth week of my first semester,” she told us. “Physics was really difficult, all this new stuff that I was seeing for the first time.” But she “kinda hung on” and entered “senior year, with senior standing.” Her ability to hang on was in part the result of her suburban high school with its college preparatory curriculum, and a residential summer research program at one of the state universities that she gained access to through her high school.

What Julissa’s high school did not prepare her for were the ways that the racial-ethnic stratification in academic achievement create false identity choices for high-achieving Black and Latinx students.²⁰ The initial dearth of Black students in her STEM major was made worse by higher attrition among some Black and Latinx students. By her senior year, she said, “I noticed I was the only African American student in my classes.” It became clear to her that the university was a “weed-out” school. In an August 2016 op-ed in the Observer, professor Sarah Cate Baker referred to “the math-science death march” that undergraduates must survive to major in a STEM field. Such courses persist because many faculty believe that they weed out the students who are not well prepared or who lack the ability to succeed in that major. Weed-out courses are also based on the belief that there is a bell curve of academic talent, and that grading on the curve provides the competition necessary to weed out less able students.

These beliefs are filled with structural and cultural misassumptions. One structural misassumption is that all students have similar K–12 academic opportunities for developing their underlying talents. One cultural misassumption is that all students are similarly motivated by competitive versus cooperative classroom contexts. Countering these misassumptions is a growing body of research showing that collaborative and interactive classrooms help level the uneven playing field.²¹ They also increase engagement with and retention of academic content, and increase minority student retention in STEM majors.²²

This “weeding out” of students from STEM courses, a disproportionate number of them Black students, and the segregated nature of all aspects of campus life, including study groups, left Julissa academically isolated. “So now I’m the only African American in [the class]. It is kind of like a weakness, because the study groups are segregated a little. But, you know, I still work through it though.”

The attrition also reinforced stereotypes and biases that manifested in professors’ interactions with her. When asked if she ever received any advice that was bad or not helpful, Julissa mentioned the low expectations of her. “Just a lot of professors who see a Black student in this large physics lecture and it’s just [they] tell you, you might not be able to get a certain score on that exam.” Those messages, she said, made her second guess why she was in college and whether the major was really what she wanted to do. “So just a lot of negative advice when it came to academics,” she said.

These and other marginalizing experiences created an institutionally constructed need for her to choose between her racial-ethnic and academic identities. This false choice dogged her entire college career, created waves of self-doubt, and created social struggles that were much more challenging than any of her academic struggles.

It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

When Julissa applied to Rural StateU, she assumed the university created and offered racially-ethnically themed housing for minority students. Such housing is one of many types of living-learning housing options for students who share common objectives or interests and who actively express an interest in sharing a common living environment. However, Rural StateU’s “unplanned” housing segregation is in sharp contrast to deliberately created racially-ethnically themed housing, which is generally a small number of dorms or floors within a larger dorm that celebrate a particular cultural history. Living in carefully planned themed housing has been associated with higher feelings of campus belonging and higher graduation rates.²³ But as Julissa only later discovered, the university’s housing policy did not offer themed housing and instead fostered segregation and promoted stereotypes.

Julissa was assigned to housing on the “Black side of campus,” which ultimately led to a disconnect between how she perceived herself and what she believed was the Black versus White student identity on campus. “On the Black side of campus,” she said, “things didn’t look as beautiful. The [White] side, you see a total difference in student motivation, their preparedness, resources offered to them. They had nicer dorms, nicer facilities and resources.” Interestingly, she associated individual attributes such as “motivation” and “preparedness” with institutional attributes such as “resources offered to them.” She also placed those individual attributes first, as if the motivation and preparedness of White students preceded the institution providing the White side of campus with better resources. These perceptions created a rupture between her Black identity and her academic identity when she moved to the White side the next year. Her comments reveal just how much she had internalized racial-ethnic stereotypes: “[Once] I moved to the [White] side of campus sophomore year, I experienced a lot of diversity. Getting to meet people that were motivated, that felt like they weren’t only entitled to things but they needed to go out and work for it. Ultimately finding my niche and group of people that motivated me was what made my sophomore year a great experience.” As Na’ilah Nasir notes, youth are always searching for ways of understanding who they are, and whenever they are in doubt, culture provides many stereotypes to fill the gap.²⁴ Julissa was no exception. She internalized and deployed racial-ethnic stereotypes to fill her gaps in understanding of the Black student body from which she distanced herself.

Julissa believed that her hard work and scholarship funding earned her the right to live on the White side. It was the university’s fault, she told us, for not making it clear that she could have lived on the White side of campus that first year, “especially since I had that first year paid in full with scholarships.” What she did not know was that her scholarship funding was exactly why she ended up on the Black side of campus. Rural StateU uses a first-come, first-served policy for housing. Students who have all their finances in place early have the first pick of dorms. This policy segregates students by income and, because of the racial-ethnic dynamics of American society, also by race-ethnicity. For Julissa, institutional decisions created the division by clustering students requiring financial aid, scholarships, and deferment into particular dorms.

Minority students at the university have long requested this policy be changed. Five years before Julissa enrolled, a minority student group drafted a resolution requesting changes to how first-year undergraduates were placed into housing. The resolution illustrates students’ understanding of how housing policies stereotype students associated with each dorm.

Because Julissa did not know that the Black students were themselves among those asking for greater housing integration, she assumed that the majority of the Black students were not open to “being around different types of people.” This unplanned housing segregation is one example of the institutional processes through which some subgroups of students are minoritized.

The Search for Campus Belonging

Although Julissa experienced several instances of structural and interpersonal discrimination, her need for broader campus belonging motivated her to minimize and suppress those experiences. I can only speculate that this must have created substantial internal conflict, because she also describes herself as someone who speaks up about prejudice, as she did when serving as an elected representative on one of the student affairs committees.

Despite her recognition of and readiness to challenge discrimination and prejudice whenever she saw it in others, she was often blind to her own experiences with discrimination, and blind to her own prejudices or, more aptly, blind to her own internalized racism—conscious or unconscious acceptance of the racist stereotypes and biases of one’s racial-ethnic group, and the resulting discriminating, criticizing, fault-finding of oneself and others of one’s group.

Julissa’s conscious acknowledgment of having experienced individual and institutional discrimination only surfaced at the end of roundabout answers to questions. When asked direct questions about experiences of discrimination, her first response was denial.

The conflict between her need for institutional belonging and experiences with institutionalized racism was evident when discussing a protest during her sophomore year. The protesters’ demands, she said, “sparked into African Americans’ feeling like they don’t have as many resources and opportunities available to them. I totally disagree. I was even more disgusted that campus administrators that classified as African Americans or African felt the same way as students.” Do recall that she described, at length, the benefits of moving to the White side of campus.

Her new resources were not just material supports but also informal informational supports.

At other times, she noted the relative lack of resources and opportunities in the organizations tasked with serving minority students.

Each discriminatory and differential experience was discussed as a discrete event, and she didn’t tie them to institutionalized racism. Julissa’s need for institutional belonging was so strong that not once in any of the interviews did she connect the improvements she experienced after moving to the White side of campus with Black students’ demands for institutional change and redress.

Her perceived conflicts between her institutional identity (who she was as a student at that institution) and her Black student identity (who she was as a Black student at that institution) were so strong that she felt uncomfortable when attending Black student meetings. She felt that Black student organizations were “not inclusive” and consequently were not aligned with the “university’s mission to be inclusive.” Her identity conflicts become even more apparent when these critical comments are compared against the matter-of-fact tone taken when she discussed observed self-segregating behavior among White students: “When [as a junior] I sit back as a new student orientation adviser and it’s the first day, and we take our freshmen to dinner, and they don’t really know each other, of course the White males always flock to each other, White females always flock to each other, and it really leaves the minorities [with] a sense that, OK, since they’re doing that, we have to, kinda flock to ourselves too.”

Julissa’s critical view of self-segregation when discussing Black student organizations but more matter-of-fact view of self-segregation among White students aligns with Beverly Tatum’s finding that “when a group of Black teens are sitting together in the cafeteria … school administrators want to know not only why they are sitting together, but what can be done to prevent it.”²⁶ Like the school administrators, only when focusing on Black students does Julissa see self-segregation as problematic, and also like the school administrators, Julissa misunderstands the role of self-segregation in positive identity development. Research shows that same race-ethnicity peer networks facilitate minority students’ adjustment to historically White schools.²⁷ Such identity-affirming counterspaces allow them to maintain a strong sense of self while striving for school success.²⁸

Essentially, her understanding of herself as a successful student who was integrated into the larger campus community was in direct opposition to being embedded in the Black campus community.

Julissa also lacked critical insight into being the token Black student in the many cocurricular organizations in which she was a member. She was either the first or currently the only Black student in all of her cocurricular activities. Tokenism occurs when individual members of minority communities “are [singled out as] representatives of their social category; they are asked for expert opinions about this category, treated according to the stereotypes about it, and face other problems related to their distinctiveness.”²⁹

Instead, she expressed pride in being the first or only Black person in the organization and did not see it as an aspect of structural racism. Without being prompted, Julissa repeatedly prefaced discussion of her cocurricular activities by stating her racial-ethnic status in that organization. “Being the first African American to join a predominately Caucasian student organization since the school opened. That was really huge,” she said of her membership in the organization for future professional chemical scientists. She was also “the first Black student ever to have an executive board position,” and “the only Black person in the student advancement committee in the college of pharmacy. And I’m the only Black person to serve on that executive board as the vice president of college relations.” This repeated, unsolicited referencing of her racial-ethnic status in her campus activities illustrates how tokenism is injurious to one’s sense of self and creates a false sense of progress.³⁰

Julissa’s shifting between claiming and denying her Black identity illustrates how the meaning of any given social identity depends on situational cues.³¹ In Julissa’s eyes, the weeding out of Black students from STEM majors created a need to distance herself from her racial-ethnic identity in academic contexts, but she embraces the token prominence of her racial-ethnic identity when she is the only Black student in the organization.

Internalized Racialism

Julissa uncritically internalized both the positive and negative stereotypes of Black Americans, a process that is termed internalized racialism, and then uncritically deployed them when referencing herself and others.³² Her reflexive stance throughout each interview was to deny that being connected to the Black community on campus was an important aspect of her sense of self. As she says here, “Now in my junior year of college, my closest friends don’t really identify as African American, and there’s a mixture of ethnic cultures and diversity within my circle of friends. So campus social life is really awesome!” A closer look at this claim of not having any friends who “really identify as African American” revealed that two of her core group of friends were Black women. What she did not have, however, were Black friends who typified the racial-ethnic stereotypes she had internalized.

Her broad-bush stereotyping of unknown Black students reveals how Julissa herself applies tokenism and exceptionalism to the individual members of the Black campus community who were her strongest sources of campus support.

Julissa again named the Black resident adviser as the person she went to for support her junior year: “For advice about school, I normally go to one of my mentors who is actually a resident director on campus, and I identify with her very well because she is African American.”

Despite being supported by Black students, staff, and alumni, when asked about her most negative experiences, each year she cited feeling rejected by and not having a connection to the Black community on campus. This issue dogged her from the start of her first year. “Freshman year was horrible. I thought that [Black students] would be welcoming, but they really weren’t.”

Being from a predominantly White northern suburb of Chicago, she said, was alienating. Black students from the city or the predominantly Black south suburbs formed cliques that excluded her. Being from “the northern suburbs, where you live in a suburb that is predominantly Caucasian, that you know has houses that look the same on the same block, they really weren’t accepted into the African American community.”

It continued to be a problem sophomore year. “I get the ‘you’re not Black enough,’ and I get the examples of you don’t hang out with Black people or you don’t wear the same clothes that we wear, or you don’t go to the same parties that we do, or you don’t associate with only Black people.” By junior year, she was feeling even more alienated. “I question why people feel the way that they do, why my Black brothers and Black sisters feel as though they should be intimidated by someone who has a lot of connections, who can share so much, so many resources, and so much knowledge.” By senior year, she was disconnected. “I can’t tell you what’s going on in the Black community; I’m not connected,” she told us.

By graduation, she was at a loss for how to respond to being asked to give a graduation speech on the journey through campus life as a Black student. In the end, she declined the invitation, “because my experience wasn’t really similar to the general experiences of Black students on campus.”

Given Julissa’s level of involvement with the broader campus community, one might wonder whether her lack of a connection to the Black campus community was indeed a defining aspect of her college life. After all, Julissa was in many ways the person to know on campus: “I’m very well known on campus because I’m always doing a lot of things. So I could be late for class, because everybody’s, you know, like ‘Hey Julissa,’ ‘Hey Julissa,’ ‘Hey Julissa.’ And I’m just, like, how do you know me? But it’s just friends saying, that’s Julissa, who does a lot of things on campus. And they become very interested in that. And they know me through blogging [about courses].” If not for her stated longing for “sisterhood,” one would conclude that Julissa’s lack of a connection to the Black community on campus was a marginal aspect of her campus life.

Being known on campus and visible in several predominantly White organizations did not provide her with the belonging she was searching for.

Institutional structures play a considerable role in determining the extent to which historically marginalized students are integrated into the broader campus community. It appears that at Rural StateU a limited number of Black students were chosen to play leadership roles in several campus-wide organizations and committees. As Julissa noted, this created competition among Black students to fill those roles, and put distance between the few Black students who held those roles and the other Black students on campus. She struggled with the competition, particularly between her and another Black female, because she “took on this very high role to represent the university.” Jealousies and accusations emerged, and as a result, “now we don’t really communicate as much. It’s just a lot of tension between a lot of Black student leaders who are doing awesome things on campus, and who are representing the Black community, when administration pulls in the same five Black faces in meetings.”

Julissa was presented with false choices between her racial-ethnic identity and her academic identity, as well as between inclusion in racial-ethnic counterspaces and inclusion in the broader campus community. The very low representation of Black students on campus (about 5 percent) means that their coming together in physical counterspaces is paradoxically highly visible. This intentionality and visibility may be experienced by some Black students as making a very public and political choice to separate one’s self from the broader institution. Most universities stop at structural diversity, and most, like Rural StateU, have made only marginal progress in that regard. As will be detailed in the subsequent chapters, the other aspects of diversity that matter are interactional diversity (the quality of intergroup social interactions among peers, faculty, and administration), cocurricular diversity (the social and cultural diversity in the range of clubs, activities, and living arrangements), and curricular diversity (the extent to which underrepresented students can engage academic content that allows for critical examinations of their social identities).³³

Julissa’s experiences illustrate just how profoundly one’s identity is shaped by whether a given identity is perceived as being valued in a given context. In her case it was racial-ethnic identity, but the same would be true of any marginalized social identity.³⁴ She understood the material segregation and unequal distribution of resources on campus, such as the lower-quality housing on the Black side of campus and the minority student office’s proportionally lower financial resources and staff, as indicative of Black students’ low status on campus. Her first response as a Black student was to question her campus belonging. However, her second response and way of resolving this identity conflict was to separate herself from Black students and then question Black students’ campus belonging.³⁵

Her experiences also illustrate that people have multiple sources of identity and that there can be conflict among those sources of identity. Minorities are particularly aware of one’s shifting self-understandings and shifting self- presentations as the context changes. This shifting is captured by the concept of code switching—linguistic and behavioral changes in the ways people express themselves based on their immediate cultural context.³⁶ Minority students have a greater burden of being responsive to the various contexts that they traverse across the university, differing contexts that communicate different messages about which aspects of their identities are valued versus stigmatized in a given context. In contrast, White students, particularly White men, are more likely to perceive a high level of contextual stability that results in experiencing consistent identity feedback.³⁷

All college students are seeking answers to the following three questions: How are people like me viewed at this institution? How do I want to engage with or distance myself from various subcultures of this institution to protect my sense of self? And ultimately, who am I at this institution? Student development in college is strongly determined by how the institution organizes itself to answer these questions.