Exactly two years ago to this day, a retirement celebration was held for Professor Patricia Gurin on the UM campus. I (along with a large number of other former students) had the pleasure of working with Pat, and I was equally pleased to attend the retirement festivities. I will discuss three areas in this write-up: the retirement celebration itself, Pat's work in recent years in the area of campus diversity, and the research I and a fellow student, Gretchen Lopez, worked on with Pat.

The Retirement Celebration

A couple of springs ago, I received a letter from Pat dated March 7, 2002, inviting former students of hers to come back to Ann Arbor the weekend of June 14-16, 2002 for both a formal UM Psychology Department event to mark her retirement and other informal gatherings (e.g., a dinner and a brunch).

The letter was very moving, referring to the retirement/reunion weekend as an opportunity "for me to appreciate what is the most important legacy of my years at Michigan. That legacy is you!"

Now, it doesn't take much to get me to go back to Ann Arbor, and I jumped at the chance to attend Pat's events.

The first day, Friday, June 14, consisted of a full day's set of addresses and panel presentations on the many facets of Pat's career at UM (teacher, researcher, mentor, administrator).

Hazel Markus, a Michigan Ph.D. and for many years a professor at UM before moving to Stanford, began the festivities. Hazel's splashy PowerPoint presentation basically covered Pat's life history.

Nancy Cantor, a former Michigan provost and chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at the time of Pat's retirement, also gave an eloquent address (see my February 20, 2004 entry for an update on Nancy). Nancy recalled her days as provost, working with Pat when Pat was serving as interim dean of UM's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA). Mainly, though, Nancy focused on Pat's research on campus diversity and the exacting standards to which Pat was subjecting her own research, because the research could come into play in the legal challenges to UM's affirmative action policies (which culminated at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, about which more later).

Among the panel presentations, one focused on Pat as a mentor, with former graduate students (carefully selected to represent different eras) conveying their experiences. The representative of my era was Kerth O'Brien, who has been on the faculty at Portland (Oregon, as opposed to Maine) State University since receiving her Ph.D. in 1987.

Kerth talked about coming away from meetings with Pat where they had worked on Kerth's dissertation feeling "intellectually rolfed." For those of you not familiar with rolfing, according to a website on the subject, the technique involves deep-tissue massage that "aims to realign the body by using intense pressure and stroking to stretch shortened and tightened fascia back into shape." (As an aside, this past year I advised a student at Texas Tech, Andrea McCourt, on her dissertation; I told her about the "intellectual rolfing" reference, and she seemed to think it fit my advising style, too!)

After all the talks on Friday, a reception was held at UM's Museum of Art. The reception provided further opportunity to catch up with current UM faculty members and fellow alumni. Earlier in the day, I had learned that by amazing coincidence, another conference was going on simultaneously at UM on the developmental psychology of the transition to adulthood, which happens to be one of my main research areas. Thanks to John Schulenberg, who let me sit in, I was able to take in some of the "transition" conference in between some of Pat's sessions.

At the transition conference, I saw University of Minnesota sociologist Jeylan Mortimer, a Michigan Ph.D. whom I knew to have a connection to Pat (and, as it turned out, Pat's husband Gerry). I invited Jeylan to stop by the reception to see Pat and Gerry, which she did. Meanwhile, before the reception, I had told Pat to expect a "mystery guest" at the reception, which was Jeylan.

Saturday night, Pat and Gerry gathered with her former students at a local restaurant for dinner. One of the attendees was Dottie Walker, the administrative secretary for the social psych program when many of us were in graduate school. I have some electronic pictures from the dinner (taken by Lisa Brown) and other events of Pat's weekend. If anyone wants a copy, you can e-mail me (see my faculty website in the "Links" section in the upper right-hand part of the page).

Pat's Research on Campus Diversity

As most readers of this website would likely be aware, the University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions policies were challenged in two companion cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and were decided in June, 2003: Gratz v. Bollinger, involving LSA undergraduate admissions, and Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the Law School. (Bollinger is Lee Bollinger, the UM President at time the policies were implemented and now the president of Columbia University.) The Law School's admissions policy was upheld and the undergraduate one overturned; however, UM was able to craft a new undergraduate policy based on the Law School's.

An expert report by Pat, deriving from her research, was part of the materials of the cases. The following are excerpts from the report ("Empirical Results" section):

An important question to examine first is whether structural diversity -- the degree to which students of color are represented in the student body of a college -- shapes classroom diversity and opportunities to interact with diverse peers. It is through these diversity experiences that growth and development occur among college students. To test this hypothesis, I use data from the national CIRP data base...

Structural diversity had significant positive effects on classroom diversity and interactional diversity among all students. Attending a diverse college also resulted in more diverse friends, neighbors, and work associates nine years after college entry. This is strong evidence that structural diversity creates conditions that lead students to experience diversity in ways that would not occur in a more homogeneous student body.

Pat and colleagues have published some of this research in the Harvard Educational Review and the Journal of Social Issues. Further, as I recently learned via an ad for the University of Michigan Press in the Spring 2004 LSA Magazine, Pat has a new book out entitled Defending Diversity, co-authored with Jeffrey Lehman (former UM Law School dean and now president of Cornell University) and Earl Lewis (former dean of UM's Rackham Graduate School and recently named provost of Emory University).

Gretchen's and My Research with Pat

Like the aformentioned research on diversity, the studies that fellow student Gretchen Lopez and I worked on with Pat involved social issues and individuals' experiences in social contexts. In the end, we got a couple of conference papers out of our work. One of them, entitled "Attributional Complexity and Political Thinking," by Lopez, Reifman, and Gurin, was presented at the 1988 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is Gretchen's hometown, and I later lived in Buffalo when I had a position at the Research Institute on Addictions (1991-1997).

I still have the EPA program containing the abstract:

The hypothesis that cognitive complexity is reflected in political thinking was examined using questionnaires administered to 63 undergraduates. The questionnaires measured (a) individual differences in cognitive complexity of causal attributions, and (b) political beliefs about gender, race, and class disparities. As predicted, subjects with complex external attributional styles were more likely to identify societal discrimination, as opposed to personal motivation, as the cause of group disparities. The role of cognitive styles in political socialization is discussed.