While there is significant scholarly interest in examining the mechanisms and justifications for diversifying colleges and universities, far less is known about how diversity is experienced as a field of practice. To address this lacuna, this study examines the daily realities of students, staff, faculty, administrators, and community members engaged in diversity policy and practice. This dissertation poses the following question: How are institutional relationships produced and organized through the practice of diversity and how is this experienced by diversity workers? To answer this question, I engaged in sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the diversity apparatus of a large, public institution I call State University. Drawing on the traditions of institutional and educational policy ethnography and post-Marxist and racial formation theory, I examine how seemingly disconnected and partially connected diversity workers attempted to advance the university's diversity efforts in the midst of a racialized institutional crisis. Diversity workers mobilized in hopes of transforming the institution according to competing conceptions of what diversity is and what a diverse and inclusive university looks like, conceptions I refer to as diversity ideologies. Actors organized around these ideologies to engage in institutional projects, or collective attempts to transform the university, and I identify five overlapping, competing, and conflicting institutional projects. In order to advance their agendas, actors strategically disarticulated and rearticulated the language of other institutional projects in hopes of winning consent for their own project. I argue that the ultimate shape of diversity policy and practice at State University was determined both by how these projects interacted as well as by the university's uneven, heterarchical power structure. This study demonstrates that diversity policy is produced in and through institutional practices and hegemonic struggles to determine the meaning and institutional significance of diversity. This approach illuminates how diversity policy and practice can both meet the needs of individual minoritized students, staff, and faculty and constrain and frustrate attempts at institutional transformation. In doing so, the study also provides insight for individuals and groups interested in advancing a more radical and just vision of diversity in higher education. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]