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Monday’s Supreme Court decision allowing renewed affirmative action in higher education has produced more questions than answers. What percentage of one’s heritage must be minority to qualify for racial preferences? How will government-sanctioned racial discrimination cure the problem of racial inequality? Can someone define the term “critical mass” without using circular reasoning? And will racial preferences ever end?

In two conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court announced Monday that it would effectively uphold the use of racial discrimination in college admissions, so long as universities weren’t too obvious when doing so. The court not only worsened the problem of racial preferences, but it rewrote the Constitution in the process.

Judging a case against the University of Michigan, the High Court ruled that the university’s undergraduate admission system was too much like the practice of maintaining racial quotas and was therefore unconstitutional. On the other hand, the court upheld the university’s law school’s use of race in admissions because it uses the term “critical mass” instead of “quota.”

Essentially, administrators chose a target number of favored minority students, called a “critical mass,” and admitted minority applicants to achieve a goal.

Based on this, the court decided schools may not openly use racially discriminatory methods, but they may use subjective and ambiguous methods to take race into account. During Supreme Court testimony, representatives for the University of Michigan could not even define how a “critical mass” differed from a quota – for very good reason.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion of the Court, stating that “In summary, the Equal Protection Clause (of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) does not prohibit the (University of Michigan) Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

Up until Monday, affirmative action was only allowed as a temporary violation of the Constitution to remedy past racial discrimination. Now that O’Connor has justified the suspension of constitutional rights based on the never-ending cause of creating racial diversity, there will be no stop to racial discrimination by the government for as long as the ruling stands.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist was critical of O’Connor’s ruling. “The (University of Michigan) Law School has managed its admissions program, not to achieve a critical mass but to extend offers of admission to members of selected minority groups in proportion to their statistical representation in the applicant pool. But this is precisely the type of racial balancing that the Court itself calls patently unconstitutional. ... Here the means actually used are forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.”

Rehnquist’s assessment is exactly correct. To reach their decision, the majority of the justices had to overlook years of precedent as well as common sense.

By allowing discrimination to take place whenever an administrator wishes, the Supreme Court has left individuals’ constitutional rights unprotected in the hands of unaccountable officials. This action has undone years of progress toward the color-blind society Martin Luther King Jr. pushed and the Constitution established. Because of this, the American people and government will have to address the issue of race more now than ever before.

All today’s university applicants can do is pray that by the time their children are of college age their skin color will not be held against them. Like King before me, that is my dream, too.

Maddox is from Texas A&M.

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