Before two lawsuits challenged the University's use of race in admissions, before University lawyers wrote legal briefs defending the Law School and LSA policies, before the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear both cases April 1, emeritus Prof. Patricia Gurin conducted a study based solely on her scholarly interests.

Now the study - which Gurin said provides empirical evidence linking diversity to numerous educational benefits - plays a key role in the University's argument that diversity is a compelling state interest, and that race should be considered as one of many admissions factors.

"The students who have the most experience with diversity were more likely, in a very reliable manner, to think a little differently, to take consideration of multiple perspectives, to be more engaged in citizen activities," Gurin said during an interview with The Michigan Daily.

The study also concluded that merely enrolling a certain number of minorities is not enough to achieve the educational benefits of diversity, Gurin said.

"It's the actual experience that students have, and not just whether or not diverse students are out there," she said. "(Diversity) is just a resource that universities need to make use of and that students need to avail themselves of, or it doesn't make any difference."

Three years before the lawsuits were filed in 1997, Gurin, then a tenured psychology professor, compiled data from the Michigan Student Survey of University Students and from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, conducted at the University of California at Los Angeles, which surveyed thousands of students from 184 colleges across the nation.

Both studies asked white, black and Hispanic students about their experiences interacting with diverse peers in the classroom and informal settings. Students were surveyed during their freshman terms and again four years later. Various factors were controlled, including students' backgrounds, grades, test scores and their institution's emphasis on diversity.

The study shows that the diversity of the University's campus challenges students to think in new ways, Gurin said, because almost all whites and more than half of the blacks surveyed attended predominantly segregated high schools.

"What happens when students hit Michigan with the level of diversity we have? It's different, it's discrepant, it's novel," she said. "We did find (that) the more students have actually interacted with diverse peers, the more by the senior year they were doing active thinking."

Such active thinking encourages students to take into account multiple perspectives when analyzing social situations, Gurin said.

The results from the University survey are remarkably consistent with the results from the national study, Gurin said, and results were similar for all racial groups surveyed. Responses to various survey questions - which included how often students talked about personal or racial issues with diverse peers outside of class, and how often they experienced hostile relationships with minorities - also were consistent with the amount of educational benefits students experienced, she said.

"There is a lot of belief that somehow this is good for minority students and not for whites, or maybe some people think it's good for whites but it's not good minority groups, (but) we just find very little evidence of that," she said.

The study also shows that students who attend diverse schools are more likely to engage in civic participation. The ability to work well with people of multiple backgrounds is vital because many University students will go on to become corporate and political leaders by mid-century, when more than half of the U.S. population will be non-white, Gurin said.

"They can be motivated to understand others who are different from them, they can understand that difference isn't necessarily a bad thing for democracy," she said.

Gurin said her study was the first "overall effort to try and look at the benefits of diversity."

Gurin's study claims interaction with minorities is necessary to reap the benefits of diversity. But the University refers to Gurin's evidence in its briefs to justify using race as an admissions factor to enroll a critical mass of minorities.

Gurin said the University is trying to prove "the probability of interacting goes down to so infinitesimal in the important small settings under the race-blind admissions that we know that we have negatively affected the educational benefits of diversity."

"We're never saying it's got to be that big, we're saying it can never be this small," she said.