Racial preferences, or affirmative action, or quotas, or call-them-what-you-will, are back in the news:

• The Supreme Court-which has picked up four new justices in four years while losing its three strongest proponents of affirmative action-has agreed to decide a racial-preference case for the first time since it struck down a state program in 1989 and upheld a federal one in 1990, leaving the law in a state of uncertainty. The case, Adarand Constructors v. Peña, involves the preferential award of a federal highway subcontract in Colorado.

• Likely to arrive at the Court by 1996 is Taxman v Board of Education of Piscataway, a case that the Clinton Justice Department has made famous-to the delight of Republicans hoping to unseat the president-by defending a New Jersey school district’s decision to lay off a white teacher and keep an equally qualified black teacher, on the basis of race.

Also headed for the Court is the most disconcerting case of all: Hopwood v. Texas, an appeal involving the University of Texas Law School by white applicants challenging the school’s policy of seeking 5 percent black and 10 percent Hispanic enrollment by admitting several times as many minority students as would a colorblind process and passing over hundreds of whites with higher grades and test scores. Virtually every elite university in the country does the same, 16 years after the Court held in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), that any regime that operates as a quota system driven by racial numbers was unconstitutional.

The supposedly temporary experiment with modest racial preferences on which this nation embarked in the 1970s has become a long-term, self-perpetuating addiction. With no end in sight, it is sapping the health of the body politic.

Both the benefits and the costs of racial preferences are familiar.

I have two daughters, 7 and 10 years old. I want them to have every opportunity to develop their educational potential to the fullest, so that they will be able to (among other things) compete against men for good jobs. And I am concerned that their opportunities will be diminished-not enlarged-by one of the feminist movement’s current crusades.

Feminist groups and their allies in the Justice Department are urging the courts to force the nation’s two remaining bastions of all-male, boot-camp-style, state-supported military education-Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and The Citadel, in South Carolina-to admit women. These cases, pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, seem likely to produce a major Supreme Court ruling. And if recent precedents are any guide, the feminists may well win.

I’m afraid that my daughters will be among the losers.

The immediate effect of such a decision, of course, would be to create opportunities for the tiny handful of young women who want the attend VMI and The Citadel. These institutions argue, on the other hand, that coeducation would impair the educational and social development of a considerably larger number of young men: those who thrive on the kind of harsh regimen of physical and psychological adversity that VMI and The Citadel now offer, which might have to be watered down to accommodate coeducation.

Of more concern to me is the probable secondary effect of a precedent barring all male education at VMI and The Citadel: It would raise higher the already daunting legal barriers to experimentation with any form of public single-sex education.

Harvard, like most universities, gives alumni children a break in admissions. Some Asian-Americans see this as illegal discrimination, because mostly white "alum-kids" bump Asian-Americans who would otherwise get in.

The Education Department recently ended a probe into this particular thumb on Harvard’s scales, finding it justified by the need to sustain the flow of alumni dollars and volunteer work.

But Asian-Americans aren’t satisfied. And their complaint (which also encompasses preferences for athletes, most of whom are white or black) opens a useful window onto the larger controversy over racial affirmative action.

The most obvious point is that the conservatives who denounce the unfairness of preferences for (mostly non-Asian) minorities are strangely silent about alumni preferences. This lack of symmetry renders their arguments a bit suspect.

If fairness is the end and merit selection the means, then it should be as important to make Harvard and its ilk "alum-blind" as to make them colorblind. Indeed, a strong case for discriminating against alum-kids might be inferred from a 1979 article by that scourge of affirmative action, then Professor Antonin Scalia.

After trashing racial preferences-as an effort to ease the WASP conscience at the expense of those whose immigrant parents (like Scalia’s father) "never profited from the sweat of any black man’s brow"-Scalia appended an intriguing afterthought:

"I do not, on the other hand, oppose-indeed, I strongly favor-what might be called …’affirmative action programs’ of many types of help for the poor and disadvantaged. It may well be that many, or even most, of those benefited … would be members of minority races…. I would not care if all of them were."