“These circumstances refute any criticism that the university did not make good-faith efforts to comply with the law.” So wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy recently in his opinion for the Supreme Court upholding the University of Texas at Austin’s racial preferences admissions program in the lawsuit originally filed by Abigail Fisher almost a decade ago.

Regrettably, this Alice-in-Wonderland-like fog about how America’s colleges and universities are administered traces to the opinion that started the nation’s highest court down this decades’ long rabbit hole into the admissions practices of higher education: Justice Lewis Powell’s solitary concurrence in the 1978 case of University of California v. Bakke.