WHAT THE HECK IS A CREED? A few of you have asked why I haven't weighed in on the Supreme Court's ruling on the University of Michigan affirmative action case. Here I weigh:

I'm not going to debate the particulars of the Michigan case, whether that university's exact policy is or is not constitutional. For one, I'm not a constitutional lawyer, thank God. For two, I'm bored by the issue of constitutionality, not to mention the details of just about anything. What I'm more interested in is the issue of affirmative action itself.

In my view, the admissions policies of public universities, not to mention the hiring practices of our businesses, should not be engineered to create equality. That's an impossible task. Instead, the policies should enforce equal opportunity for all applicants, regardless of race, creed (whatever that is), sexual orientation, and so forth. (Wait, is 'creed' one's religion? Must go to dictionary.com.) Ideally, for high school underachievers like me, those policies also would not discriminate based on one's lackluster grade point average or lack of serious pre-college coursework. But that's water under the bridge. (Damn you Duke! How dare you decline my early-decision application and toss me back into the unwashed pool of general admissions! Unwashed pool! Hee hee.)

Okay, so to recap: equality impossible, equal opportunity possible.

No matter what affirmative action proponents say, we all know the policy can and does grant admission slots to lesser-qualified candidates, solely based on race. It's not an appropriate long-term policy for a country whose constitution clearly prescribes color-blindness. At best, it's a kind of reparation, a short-term remedy for a system left unbalanced by years of, let's face it, unconstitutional exclusionary practices. It's tit for tat, basically.

Which leads me to one of my main issues with affirmative action:

When does it end? What goals are we trying to reach?

Affirmative action without end is simply replacing one racist policy with another and is, in my view, unconstitutional. Justice O'Connor seems to agree that it's not anything but a short-term fix when she writes: "The court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen asserts that O'Connor, in referring to some far off date when the ends of affirmative action have been met (some amorphous percentage of minorities having been educated and advanced) actually reminds us how silly and wrong-headed the policy is in the first place. What exact percentage of minorities are we aiming for? How will we know when we get there?

Ah. I just looked up 'creed'. According to dictionary.com, it's "a formal statement of religious belief; a confession of faith." Well, then, when it comes to higher education my creed is basic equality of opportunity -- the belief that no man or woman can be judged differently than another simply based on skin color, sexual orientation, or crappy high school transcript. This is the north star we're all aiming at, and I confess I have faith we'll eventually get there.

The short-term persistence of affirmative action should not concern anyone. At the very worst, we're taking a small but significant step to repair past ills. But if we are to continue this policy over the short term, as it appears we are, we should set about very quickly to determine how we'll know when we don't need it anymore. As Cohen asserts, this will be a difficult if not impossible task.