Disability and Diversity on CSU Websites: A Critical Discourse Study

With more than 325,000 students, the California State University (CSU) system is 1 of the largest in the United States, making it a useful unit of analysis for studying disability and diversity. Using a critical discourse theoretical framework and borrowing strategies from Astroff (2001) and Pauwells (2012), we found disability information on CSU websites to have surface visibility--66% of the sites had minimal information on the home page. However, digging deeper into the sites we found frustrating navigation structures, hidden content, and the disengagement of disability from diversity. The sites constitute disability as the deficits of individual students that call for regulatory institutional responses and ignore disability as a feature of diversity.