In the current context of legal challenges to affirmative action and race-based considerations in college admissions, educators have been challenged to articulate clearly the educational purposes and benefits of diversity. In this article, Patricia Gurin, Eric Dey, Sylvia Hurtado, and Gerald Gurin explore the relationship between students' experiences with diverse peers in the college or university setting and their educational outcomes. Rooted in theories of cognitive development and social psychology, the authors present a framework for understanding how diversity introduces the relational discontinuities critical to identity construction and its subsequent role in fostering cognitive growth. Using both single-and multi-institutional data from the University of Michigan and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program. the authors go on to examine the effects of classroom diversity and informal interaction among African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and White students on learning and democrat} outcomes. The results of their analyses underscore the educational and civic importance of informal interaction among different racial and ethnic groups during the college years. The authors offer their findings as e-•idence of the continuing importance of affirmative action and diversity efforts by colleges and universities, not only as a means of increasing access to higher education for greater numbers of students, but also as a means offostering students' academic and social growth. Educators in L .S. higher education have long argued that affirmative action policies are justified because they ensure the creation of the racially and eth

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The social science statement in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) stressed that desegregation would benefit both African American and White children. Eventually, it was recognized that integration, rather than mere desegregation, was important for benefits to be realized. A parallel argument is made in the legal cases concerning affirmative action in higher education: educational benefits of diversity depend on curricular and co‐curricular experience with diverse peers, not merely on their co‐existence in the same institution (Gurin, P., 1999, Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Positive benefits of diversity were demonstrated in a study comparing students in a curricular diversity program with students in a matched control group (n = 174), and in a longitudinal survey of University of Michigan students (n = 1670).

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Three properties of gender identity-perceived similarity to other women, sense of common fate and centrality of gender to the sense of self-were measured in national surveys of women in the United States. Analyses of their relationships to gender consciousness support the general proposition that these properties of identity are implicated in different ways in collective discontent, criticism of the legitimacy of gender disparities and acceptance of change-oriented collective action. As predicted, the sense of common fate proved the most important, even after adjustments were made for the structural resources in women's lives that help them develop both a sense of common fate and gender consciousness.In the literature on political mobilization of collectivities, an important distinction has been drawn between group identity and group consciousness. Identity connotes the member's awareness of membership and feelings attached to being a member (Tajfel, 1978;Miller et al., 1981), while consciousness refers to the member's ideology about the group's position in society. Although writers who employ the concept of group consciousness invoke somewhat different terms, they all define it multidimensionally , involving a sense of collective discontent over the group's relative power, material resources or prestige; an appraisai of the legitimacy of the stratification system by which the group is favoured or disfavoured; and the belief that collective action is required to realize the group's interests (Morris & Murphy 1966; Portes, 1971; Jackman & Jackman, 1983; Gurin et al., 1980).* Validation of the distinction between identity and consciousness has been demonstrated in studies of subordinate groups prominent in American life. These studies show that consciousness is the more powerful predictor of political action (Miller et al., 1981) and identity of efficient processing of group information (Thomas, 1984; Gurin & Markus, 1985).relationship has been treated simplistically in the studies of mass publics as well as the experimental studies of intergroup relations. It is often assumed that identity and consciousness develop simultaneously as effects of social categorization and comparison (Tajfel, 1978) o r that consciousness follows automatically from identity-the inexorable culmination of a process, variously labelled decolonization (Fanon, 1963; Memmi, 1968), identity transformation (Hall et al., 1972), disassimilation (Hayes-Bautista, 1974) or nationalism (Isaacs, 1979) set in motion by the assertion of group identity. (Although Tajfel does not use the term consciousness, the new cognitions, reinterpretations and action orientations that he suggests parallel the components that constitute group consciousness. These components come into play when identity is insecure and members of denigrated groups either cannot or d o not want to leave the group.) However, the dynamics by which consciousness arises out of identity are usually not delineated, and the possibility that the relationship is problematic rather than automati...

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