EVEN AS AMERICA enjoys its newfound sense of political and cultural unity, the battles over issues of race and culture roil on, though perhaps in more muted tones. One example is the recent dust-up in California over changes to the University of California system’s admissions procedures. Actually, it wasn’t even much of a dust-up. By a 13 to 2 vote last week, the UC Regents voted to allow “personal achievement” to be considered as part of a more “holistic,” “comprehensive review” for all freshman applicants. Previously, the eight-campus UC system reserved at least half the spots in each freshman class for students solely on the basis of their academic achievement. Now, in addition to grades and test scores, all applicants will be assigned a “personal achievement rank,” with extra points awarded to students who excel in non-academic pursuits or manage to succeed academically while overcoming “life challenges,” such as (in the Los Angeles Times’s formulation) “crushing poverty, low-performing schools and language barriers.” Not surprisingly, some conservatives smell a rat, and are voicing suspicions that this is just another back-door attempt to re-impose racial preference admissions policies, which were banned in California with the 1996 passage of Proposition 209. “There is a pretty good likelihood of a lawsuit,” Sharon Browne, an attorney for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times. You can’t blame people like Ms. Browne for being skeptical. Desperate to maintain their minority enrollment numbers, college administrators and politicians have been awfully creative in devising ways to circumvent the spate of anti-preference court rulings and state referendums in recent years. Systems are now in place in some states to guarantee admission for students who graduate near the top of their classes. The top 10 percent of each high school in Texas and top 20 percent in Florida are given automatic entry into their state college systems. But conservatives whose brows furrow over all forms of affirmative action should also note that one of the most ardent opponents of racial preferences–UC regent Ward Connerly–voted in favor of the new UC admissions procedures. Though Connerly was skeptical about some aspects of the proposal, most notably the highly subjective nature of the “personal achievement” rankings, he went along with it–after an amendment was added stipulating that the new guidelines would not be used to sidestep California’s ban on racial preferences in admissions. Connerly is probably right: With the safeguarding amendment in place, the real ground for criticism here isn’t the race issue, but the questions of academic standards and feasibility. UC President Richard Atkinson and others claim the new guidelines merely bring the UC system–especially its most competitive campuses, Berkeley and UCLA–in line with other highly selective schools, such as the Ivy League. But they’re ignoring an important distinction here. The Ivies are relatively tiny and have many more resources, including well-organized alumni networks, which allow them to consider “personal achievement” much more thoroughly. The UC system is enormous–UCLA alone gets roughly 40,000 applications a year–and now it wants to take on the onerous, labor-intensive task of applying this personal achievement evaluation to every applicant. That’s a pretty tall order. President Atkinson wants to wade further into the holistic swamp: Earlier this year he proposed that UC schools stop considering students’ scores on the SAT I. And Atkinson has support beneath him. Calvin Moore, head of the faculty admissions committee at UC Berkeley, said to the Los Angeles Times, “If you look just at academics, it’s as if you’ve closed one eye. Now we are using both eyes, looking at the entire file.” But given the approach the UC system seems intent on adopting–one that will inevitably be emulated by many other public colleges–it might be more accurate to say that our universities are now simply opening one eye more widely while slowly beginning to squint with the other. Defenders of this new approach argue that “admissions is an art, not a science,” and that subjective criteria will always play a large role. And there is some validity to this point. But just a couple of generations ago, lots of colleges used the “art” of subjective admissions standards to fill their dormitories with well-to-do WASPs. Science–in the form of standardized testing–was needed to ensure that Jews and Catholics and women were given a fair shot at admission. We shouldn’t throw away this tool just because our subjective preferences have become more politically correct. Like so much else in American life, the morass of racially skewed admissions awaits final resolution by our robed masters in the judiciary. Eventually, the Supreme Court will have to tidy up the mess it made in its convoluted 1978 Bakke decision. A few years from now, two University of Michigan cases that are just reaching the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will most likely present an opportunity to take care of this house-cleaning. Until then, people like Calvin Moore will continue to try to use both eyes to look past the hard numbers which are right in front of them. Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.