But the sky has not fallen in either state. In California, there was a two-year drop in admissions of minorities. However, as William Honan reports in the New York Times, there is now "a small but significant increase in applications from blacks, Mexican Americans, Indians and Filipino Americans, largely reversing a two-year decline."

Or, as Ward Connerly puts it, "Western Civilization did not end."

What finally began is what Carla Ferri, director of undergraduate admissions, describes as "informational outreach by the university system to high school guidance counselors" and other educators who deal directly with students. Moreover, William Honan adds, there have been "more than 13,000 letters from the University of California system’s president, Richard Atkinson, to academically promising students from underrepresented groups urging them to apply."

One result of those letters may have been to help counteract the belief among some black and other underrepresented students that the California system is hostile to them. That attitude has been fostered by a number of critics of Connerly and Prop 209, who claim that doing away with race-based affirmative action sends a bitter message to blacks and others that they are not wanted on California’s campuses.

In Texas, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, "University of Texas officials predict an increase in minority enrollment at the system’s four medical schools next fall—even without considering race in admissions decisions."

Those schools—faced with the challenge of getting diversity into their classes without some kind of set-aside for minorities—did what Justice William O. Douglas described 25 years ago in his dissent in Defunis v. Odegaard:

"A black applicant who pulled himself out of the ghetto into a junior college may...demonstrate a level of motivation, perseverance, and ability that would lead a fair-minded admissions committee to conclude he has more promise for [graduate] study than the son of a rich alumnus who achieved better grades at Harvard.

"That applicant," Douglas continued, "would be offered admission not because he is black, but because as an individual he has shown he has the potential....Such a policy would not be limited to blacks or Chicanos or Filipinos or American Indians....A poor Appalachian white or some other American whose lineage is so diverse as to defy ethnic labels may demonstrate similar potential and thus be accorded favorable consideration by the committee."

If Justice Douglas’s approach had been followed then, the nation would have been spared the race-based and gender-based admissions system under which students have been judged more by collective than individual traits.

At last, in Texas, since the schools are no longer able to go by traditional affirmative-action criteria, they now look more closely at the lifelines of each applicant to medical school. And, as Douglas suggested, they find out about the obstacles each applicant has had to overcome to get where he or she is now.

As auguries continue to indicate that race-based affirmative action is in peril elsewhere in the country, there have been laments from many presidents of prestigious universities that diversity soon will disappear. It will disappear if those alleged higher education leaders simply keep on longing for the good old preferential days, instead of reaching out to students who have been underrepresented because those universities did not go looking for them—as individuals.