ABSTRACT
This chapter examines discrepancies between the recent enrollment trends of international students at the University of Toronto (UofT) and the way that international students are portrayed in the UT Magazine, a publication for the extended UofT community. We find that the UT Magazine consistently portrays its international students as exceedingly multinational, multicultural, and multi-racial, while largely excluding international students from China in representations of international students. We argue that UofT’s current practices align with the concept of “cosmetic diversity,” and make use of both “omission” and “aggregation” to ignore the real composition of UofT’s international students as two-thirds Chinese. Far from being a sincere celebration of UofT’s diversity, such practices constitute an organizational racial project that aims to counter a problematic concern held in the media and broader society that Canadian universities are “too Asian” (Wu et al. 2021).
