Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: marketing liberal arts education

College promotional discourse highlights qualities that a college claims for itself (excellence), claims to instill or select for in students (skills or leadership) or values in itself and its students (diversity). These terms appear to have clear cut referents because of their semiotic coherence in this discourse: excellence, skills and leadership denote qualities which contribute to the good of the whole and index a common perspective on what counts as good. Diversity is invoked as if it does too, but since it can denote racial difference, the denotational fit is off. The denotational parameters are reset through indexical ordering (after Silverstein): excellence, skills, and leadership establish the prior semiotic ground and diversity becomes congruent. Diversity and multiculturalism used to share that pragmatic ground but the latter has faded from use. In this paper, I show how promotional terms are strategically deployed in ways that demonstrate that pragmatic fit. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.