A recent article in the Daily Texan described a study conducted by Timothy Pippert, a sociology professor at Augsburg College in Minnesota, which found that some colleges had depicted their student bodies as diverse in brochures by cutting and pasting the faces of minority students on the bodies of white students. The study also discovered that the photographs printed in college brochures often depict diversity unrepresentative of the school's student body.
To anyone who has actually seen a college brochure, the fact that minority students might be overrepresented isn't much of a surprise. Seeing an African American or Asian American in every shot of a group of students has almost become a requirement. And why not? If I were putting together photos for a college brochure, it would be natural to choose photos representing a diverse student body rather than those composed entirely of white students. Clearly, my own inclinations demonstrate the degree to which these pamphlets have affected my perceptions, but in a larger scope, they represents the influence of the entire advertising world.
Is it wrong to misrepresent the diversity of a student body in the hopes of attracting diversity? Obviously, the cut-and-paste technique used by some colleges is misguided. It reeks of the intention to falsely represent diversity. Perhaps the next step in bad advertising would be to have a student in blackface, and I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't find that offensive. And while the stereotypical aspects of blackface do not come into play in the cutting and pasting of faces, there is still something disturbing about the process and its manipulative aspects. It could just be the front of colleges creating the illusion of a natural photograph, or it could be the arrogance of the creators thinking that they could get away with it. But the manufactured and misrepresented diversity is offensive on its own.