The University of Pittsburgh will offer health benefits to domestic partners of gay and heterosexual employees starting in January under a policy change hailed yesterday as a major breakthrough in an eight-year legal fight.

Pitt said the decision, announced yesterday, was not influenced by a 1996 lawsuit filed by seven gay and lesbian employees claiming discrimination. Rather, it was the result of competitive pressures, given how many employers now provide the benefit, including most elite research campuses with which Pitt vies for faculty and staff.

Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg disclosed the change in a campus-wide memo yesterday afternoon. Though it's unclear how conservative state legislators who staunchly oppose the benefit may react, the decision drew immediate praise from the plaintiffs and their lawyers, as well as from faculty and students who waged years of lobbying for the benefit, including protests and a hunger strike.

It also drew support from Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. A spokesman has said Rendell would not support any legislation punishing a university for enacting such a benefit.

"It's a great day for civil rights and a great day for human rights at the University of Pittsburgh," said Bruce Venarde, 41, associate chair of Pitt's history department and one of seven plaintiffs in the suit, who was on the phone for much of yesterday afternoon. "The first call, of course, was to my partner."

Last year, Temple University became the state's first public university to offer the benefit. Under a pact with union workers under, gay couples will pay the premiums themselves. Penn State University said a private employee assistance fund endowed by an anonymous donor has allowed a number of its employees to sign up for domestic partner benefits.

Temple's decision to offer domestic partner benefits was criticized at the time by Reps Daryl Metcalfe, R-Cranberry, and Jeff Coleman, R-Apollo, neither of whom could be reached yesterday. Both had suggested the move could cost Temple state funding.

"I think people view a move such as Temple's as a move toward allowing same sex marriages," Coleman said at the time.

Yesterday, state Rep. Jake Wheatley, D-Hill District, offered a sharply different view. "The decision is a strong statement by the university that it respects the rights of all of its employees."

In his memo, Nordenberg said Pitt will be the first of Pennsylvania's state-related universities to subsidize the benefit. He pointed to the rapidly changing employment climate in which Pitt must operate.

"Within the Association of American Universities, our principal peer group, nearly 80 percent of the members now offer domestic partner benefits," Nordenberg wrote. "This includes all of the private AAU universities and, in sharp contrast to the situation that existed just a few years ago, a majority of the public AAU universities."

Nationwide, 179 university campuses offered domestic partner benefits as of last year, up from 57 when the lawsuit against Pitt was filed, reported the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay rights group. During the same period, the number of employers offering domestic partner benefits grew from 315 to 5,721.

Nordenberg said those employers include two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies and, in Pittsburgh, such names as Bayer, Mellon, PNC, Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Museums, Chatham College, the city of Pittsburgh, WQED and major law firms.

Pitt employees can sign up for coverage during an enrollment period to be announced this fall and must sign an affidavit of domestic partnership, Nordenberg wrote. Pitt defines that as "a committed and sustained relationship between two adults" characterized in such ways as intermingling of financial resources and responsibilities, including joint ownership of residential property and designation of a partner as principal beneficiary of a life insurance policy or will.

"Eligible Pitt employees choosing these benefits will share the additional premium costs with the university on the same apportioned basis as employees choosing coverage for a spouse," Nordenberg wrote.

Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union, who represent plaintiffs in the Pitt lawsuit, plan to hold an 11 a.m. news conference today outside Pitt's Cathedral of Learning in Oakland that is likely to include discussion of whether the case needs to continue or will be dropped.

"In our euphoria, we haven't had a chance to sit down and talk to our clients," said Witold Walczak, litigation director for the ACLU's Pittsburgh chapter. "Any way you slice it, it's a marvelous development. It's not only good for our plaintiffs, it's good for the university.

"To say the case is over would be premature," Walczak said.

Pitt spokesman Robert Hill said it is not clear how many of the university's 12,000 employees might seek the benefit. He reiterated Pitt's position that it never discriminated, but he added: "We believe the marketplace does cry out for us to be in step by offering the benefit."

The lawsuit, which spawned a challenge to Pittsburgh's gay rights law, has been closely followed by gay-rights groups across Pennsylvania. It was first filed in 1996 before the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Deborah Henson, a former legal writing instructor who said she was wrongly denied the benefit for her partner.

That commission found probable cause that Pitt had discriminated, but in a pair of rulings, including one in January, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Robert Gallo enjoined the commission from hearing the case, saying he found no evidence that Pitt intentionally discriminated.

He did not address Pitt's challenge to the validity of Pittsburgh's gay rights law itself, a move that triggered campus protests and criticism from gay rights groups when Pitt first raised it in 1998.

Christie Hudson, a graduate student and Pitt employee who took part in that protest, called yesterday's development remarkable, if a long time in coming. "I'm thrilled," she said.