LAST WEEK'S Supreme Court rulings in the University of Michigan cases set a modern record for shamelessness. State universities are not barred by the Constitution from engaging in racial discrimination, five justices decided. They are only prohibited from doing so blatantly. The court had the opportunity to declare, once and for all, that penalizing or rewarding people on the basis of skin color is repugnant to the Constitution. It declared instead that when racial preferences march under the banner of ''diversity,'' the Constitution winks and looks the other way.

And so another generation is condemned to the racial obsessiveness that now permeates American campuses.[...]

[...]But black students would not need so much ''support'' if they weren't attending colleges and universities at which so many of them are academically outmatched. In that sense, students who take part in segregated graduation galas do indeed have something to celebrate. Unlike so many of their racial peers, they're actually graduating.

But to point that out is to commit the social faux pas of noticing the elephant in the affirmative-action living room: the failure of so many black students to finish college. Nearly half of all black Americans between 25 and 29 have been to college, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom wrote in their sweeping 1997 book, ''America in Black and White,'' but only 15 percent managed to earn a bachelor's degree. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education said in 1994 that the black college dropout rate was ''disastrous.'' It still is.

This is the unfortunate and unavoidable result of race-based admissions. To achieve a racially balanced student body, universities lower the academic standard black and Hispanic applicants must meet. That enables the schools to avoid the embarrassment of an insufficiently ''diverse'' entering class. But it also condemns the racially preferred minorities to an academic environment in which they are consistently outperformed. That embarrassment, apparently, the schools don't mind.[...]