Multimodality on Princeton University’s Homepage: Redefining Diversity Through the Years

Introduction
When the Internet first became available to the public, websites are heavily text-based and
content has to be delivered in writing. Over the years, with the option of images and videos made
available online, Internet users can now provide context to their content in a visually appealing
way, to reaffirm the messaging or branding of an organization. With universities that are under
scrutiny for the lack of racial and economic diversity among their student body, their homepage
websites are now a feasible channel to change their brand and improve their image. I argue that
multimodality on the Internet has allowed Princeton University to improve their reputation on
issues pertaining to the history of Princeton and the racial and economic diversity of its students.
I will do this by using the Wayback Machine to look at the changes in the homepage website
between 1996 and 2019 and focus on the use of other modes and the change in language use
across time to make a qualitative and comparative analysis.

Background and Theoretical Framework

Princeton University
Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey.
Initially chartered in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it is the fourth-oldest higher education
institution in the United States and was officially renamed as Princeton University after 150
years in 1896. From its website (Princeton University),

Princeton University is a vibrant community of scholarship and learning that stands in the
nation’s service and the service of humanity. Its educational mission is to prepare
students to pursue meaningful lives and to help address the challenges of the future.

Princeton has produced 65 Nobel laureates, two U.S. presidents and 12 Supreme Court Justices,
living up to its unofficial motto, “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity”. The U.S.
Senate has also had a Princeton graduate serving since its establishment in 1789 except for 20
years in all of its history. It even served as the capital of the U.S. for four months in 1783,
making it one of the nine locations in the U.S. that have ever been the country’s capital.
However, as an Ivy League school, it has a tradition of catering to the privileged and
elite. Princeton has a reputation of being preppy, elitist and white. Applicants with alumni
parents or stepparents are considered “legacy” applicants and this status gives them an
advantage. These applicants are “admitted at four times the general rate, or roughly 30%
compared with about 7% overall over the past five years” (Korn 2018). Since legacy students are
more likely to be offered a place, this creates a cycle of Princeton graduates feeding their
children into an existing pipeline, putting other applicants at a disadvantage.
Historically, Princeton has also lagged behind other Ivies in diversifying its student body,
only admitting Jewish and black students in the 1950s, making it the last Ivy league school to
admit black students. Princeton started accepting women as undergraduate students in 1969 but
even then, Princeton eating clubs only went coeducational in 1979, after a lawsuit in which the
U.S. Supreme Court denied the appeal of one of the eating clubs to ban women in their
membership. In 2016, students protested for the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of
Public and International Affairs and the Wilson residential college because of Woodrow
Wilson’s legacy and support of racial segregation during his two terms as the 28th President of
the United States, setting back African Americans significantly in the civil rights movement.

Multimodality on the Internet

Traditionally, communication is highly text-based with writing, making it one-dimensional.
When the Internet first started, users could only view text-only pages between 1991 and 1993.
There were no graphic design elements like images, videos or sounds. However, this started to
change when Mosaic, a new web browser, was created (Technopedia):

There was no shortage of Web browsers at the time, but almost all of them were Unix-
based and naturally text heavy. There was really no unified approach to things like
images or sounds, and most browsers handled them by loading separate windows.
Andreessen and Bina created Mosaic, a browser that broke this mold.

The focus on websites then shifted from text-only content to being multimodal, with more visual
elements to appeal to users. Style sheets and HTML tables were later created, which allowed
more complex designs, followed by animated GIFs and the PNG image format. Now, there are
different focuses in web design, like user experience and interactive design, responsive
framework layout, typography and motion graphics, incorporating new modes into
communication, be it textual, spatial or visual.
This became useful for many universities. University homepages are often the first
introduction to a university for many students, especially in this increasingly global world (Sen,
Lindgaard and Patrick 2007). For universities, this means that they are now able to use visual
cues to provide context to appealing information they want to highlight, e.g. history and
diversity. There are many ways universities can manipulate other modes to convey specific
messages on their websites, like image, gaze, color, layout, position (Miri 2016). Unlike existing
social media platforms, there is no limitation on the number of characters and amount of text for
their content. Not bound by social media restrictions but only the university’s policies and the
ability of the Internet to meet the demands of the web developers, universities are able to harness
the advantages of different and multiple modes to deliver their messages the way they want.

Methodology
The Wayback Machine is a digital library of websites by The Internet Archive that captures
websites from the Internet and manages a database of archives since 1996. The Internet Archive
started to archive websites because online content is temporary yet growing at fast pace. Unlike
newspapers, there was no way to go back in time to view websites after they were updated,
hence the birth of the Wayback Machine. Their mission is to “provide Universal Access to All
Knowledge” and they now have over 20 years of accessible web history (The Internet Archive).
It is easy and intuitive to use, and users can search for different keywords and URLs to find
websites from 1996 until now. I will use existing snapshots of Princeton’s homepage
(www.princeton.edu) in different years to observe changes in the website, qualitatively and
comparatively across time.

Analysis

Diagram 1: Princeton’s homepage in 1996 Diagram 2: List of images on rotation

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine only goes back to 1996 and there were already
images on the website. The first record of the website is on 19 December 1996, Princeton 250th
anniversary. There was only one image in the center of the homepage and the image changes
every five minutes from a list of existing images of buildings on campus, which users can see.
There was already the concept of tabs and separation of information. The layout of the website is
fairly simple, with no background and a link to the homepage in the top left (the Princeton logo).
As mentioned earlier, the images on rotation are photographs on buildings on campus,
and the choice of using buildings may have several factors. It could have been more difficult to
get photographs of activities or students on campus back then, but it could also because that
campus buildings appeal to many students for different reasons. According to Sen, Lindgaard
and Patrick (2007), pictures of buildings appeal to both Western and Eastern students. Western
students are interested in the age of a building because “it signals the promise of a 'novel' and
'unique' university experience” while Eastern students look at the architecture of a university as a
form of “validation of the university's reputation and history” (Sen, Lindgaard & Patrick 2007).
This makes images of campus buildings a good marketing strategy to students from all cultural
backgrounds and a safe choice as it appeals to different demographics.
 Since there were no images of students or student life on campus, it is difficult to imply
Princeton’s stance on the racial and economic diversity of its student body. The lack of
representation on the website could also be a reflection of the lack of conversation and call for
action surrounding diversity in society at the time.

Diagram 3: Princeton’s homepage in 2000

In 2000, the layout significantly changed, with a more prominent use of Princeton’s
official color, the Princeton orange and a change in the sectioning of information, especially with
a new “About Princeton” tab. News and stories on the website also started using images with
captions to provide context, even though text is still the focus in these stories and most images
cannot be loaded, most likely because they were not archived.
An interesting feature is the prominence of the President’s welcome speech on the
homepage. In 2019’s version of the website, there is only the president’s biography on the
homepage, and a similar version of the welcome speech is now on the Office of the President
website, no longer one click-in from the Princeton University homepage. Both speeches are still
pretty consistent, especially the inclusion of the informal motto, even though there is a slight
rewording of “to be in the Service of all Nations” to “to be in the Service of Humanity”. The
2019 speech also mentioned “distinctive commitment to teaching at both the undergraduate and
graduate levels”, as an attempt to include and highlight graduate students since Princeton is not
as well known for its postgraduate opportunities because they do not have medical, law or
business schools. This change in the priority and accessibility of President’s welcome may have
to do the symbolic appeal of authority figures, where Western students seem to assume that
official statements are usually heavily edited to align a message to its missions and values,
making it untrue or impersonal while Eastern students seem to appreciate this kind of messages,
showing the respect of the authority of the president of a university (Sen, Lindgaard and Patrick
2007). Princeton being a Western university, this shift of focus away from the university’s
authority figures makes sense.
 There was also an interesting difference in the accessibility in the admissions office. In
2000, the admissions office stated that “[t]here is currently no way to e-mail Princeton's
admission offices” (Princeton University). They only offered a live streaming video of a campus
tour and still images from the streaming videos, for students to learn more about the university.
This could be due to many different reasons, but it definitely hinders the accessibility of the
admissions office, especially in a time when most students do not have access to the Internet, and
this obviously impacts international students and students from low-income families the most.

Diagram 4: Princeton’s homepage in 2002

In 2002, a major change in the website is the rewording of “Admission” to “Admission &
Aid”. Princeton University has been offering financial aid to its students for a long time, but in
2001, the university launched an all-grant, no-loan financial-aid policy, meaning that they will
replace loans that they used to offer with grants that no longer have to be repaid by students on
financial aid. This is a big shift in their messaging, because they were now bringing financial aid
to the forefront of the conversation with prospective applicants, implying that financial aid
should be an important and appealing issue to them when they are considering college
applications. This is clearly an effort in recruiting students from different economic backgrounds
and this did not go unnoticed. As a result, Princeton tripled the number of first-year students who
qualify for Pell Grants to 22 percent in 2017 (Anderson 2017), significantly improving the
economic diversity of the student body.
However, this was only available to U.S. and Canada citizens. Two years later, they
changed this policy again in an effort to attract more international students, by establishing one
of the largest scholarship funds among American colleges and universities for international
students, making them one of the very few schools in the U.S. that do not limit financial aid for
international students. Diverting more of their endowment resources to financial aid, 28 percent
of first-year students in 2017 were now either from low-income families or part of the first
generation in their families to attend college (Walsh 2018).

Diagram 5: Princeton’s homepage in 2010 Diagram 6: Princeton’s homepage in 2019

Between the years of 2008 and 2016, the website layout is as shown in Diagram 5, with
story highlights being videos that can be played in the frame. This signifies a change from the
priority they placed in the image mode to the video mode. Videos can carry more information
than images, and introduces the aspect of sound into multimodality, which explains the change in
their preferred mode.
On today’s website in 2019, the focus has shifted away from using videos as a mode on
the website back to images. With the change in social media usage, users now have less patience
with longer content that will require more time to load, evident from the limit of number of
characters on Twitter and the limit of the length of videos on Snapchat. Even the university has
taken the initiative to be incorporate different social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Snapchat into their branding and to help them update their
Internet audience. The website now has 5 clear main sections, “Meet Princeton”, which
highlights the history and information of the university, the two main areas of focus in the
presidents’ speech we saw earlier, “Academics” and “Research”, “One Community” which
covers student life on campus, and “Admission & Aid” as we have discussed earlier, admission
and financial aid information for prospective students.
Under “One Community”, the main tagline we can see is “Tigers of All Stripes” with an
image of four students of different race and ethnicity, clearly as a message to prospective
students about the racial diversity of students on campus. The categories that are one click away
from the homepage also include “Cultural & Affinity Groups”, “Religious Life” and “Affordable
for All”, categories that highlight the racial and economic diversity of Princeton’s students.
Navigating around the “One Community” section, it is not difficult to notice that the imagery
used shows a very diverse student body, like in Diagrams 7 and 8, and that the website
intentionally places non-white students in their images. Del Vecchio (2017) agrees with this in
“Examining Ethnic Minority Representation in Higher Education Website Imagery”,

As the student base for higher education institutions becomes increasingly non-White,
institutions will need to adjust marketing tactics to entice non-White students in order to
stay competitive in enrollment. In order to win their share of the non-White demographic,
universities will have to convince prospective students in this category that they will be
valued and well-represented in the student body and campus life. An important marketing
tool for this purpose is a campus website. University websites not only provide
prospective students pertinent financial and academic information, but they are an
important touchpoint to give students an idea of how they might fit on a certain campus.
Thus, it would make sense that webmasters and marketing staff members include
sufficient images of non-White students in imagery to ensure that non-White prospective
students can envision themselves at a campus when looking for a higher education
institution.

However, this is not solely for marketing purposes or an intentional misrepresentation of the
student body. According to Walsh (2018) who was Princeton Class of 2001, the percentage of
white undergraduate students dropped from 66 percent to 40 percent from 2001 to 2018. This
could be one of the instances of other universities intentionally misrepresenting the racial
makeup of their student body, like omitting the category for white students or counting biracial
students twice (Ford and Patterson 2018) and while the accuracy of this percentage has to be
verified, this is a welcome change for a university that plays a big role in producing the next
generation of leaders, yet has a less inclusive or appealing history.
Information for international students is also now under “One Community”, as a
standardization to reflect that there really are no major differences, as both domestic and
international students apply through the same process and qualify for the same amount of
financial aid.

Diagram 7: A graduating non-white student Diagram 8: A path on campus

with his parents covered with the colors of the LGBT flag
Conclusion
With the use of photographs and videos on their website, Princeton University has successfully
painted a more diverse image for the university and its student body, both racially and
economically. This change in marketing and branding strategy was accompanied by welcome
change in the racial makeup of the student body today, the availability of financial aid to its
students and the constant inclusion of first-generation students from low-income families.
These new modes on the Internet has allowed Princeton to put into perspective the message they
are trying to deliver with contemporary digital technologies, i.e. visual and auditory cues.
Future work can include comparing the statistics of the actual student body and the
representation of diverse students on Princeton’s homepage to ensure that there is no
misrepresentation or compiling a text corpus of official statements or news from the university to
analyze the shift in the voice and language use of university officials and when reacting to
student protests, like the 2016 Wilson legacy and the more recently 2019 Title IX Reform.

(2910 words)
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