Last year I was a member of the admissions board at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I have been a civilian professor of English for the past 16 years. The experience brought one thing home to me with great clarity: Affirmative action, racial and otherwise, is a minefield of practical paradoxes.

Like many institutions of higher education, the Naval Academy uses race as a criterion in its admissions process. The practice leads to obvious absurdities, even inequities. For this reason, the Bush administration's decision to oppose racial affirmative action in college admissions seems like a good thing.

At the same time, it's difficult not to sympathize with the goal of representativeness implicit in all affirmative-action policies. In the academy's case, it does seem important to have black and Hispanic officer-candidates when so many of the men and women in the fleet are black or Hispanic. It's not that an individual black Marine, say, needs a black officer to inspire him to follow orders, only that he needs to know there are such officers, somewhere, maybe even right here. In the military, a lot depends on "morale," that hard-to-quantify measure of satisfaction. It wouldn't help to say, "Of course Miss America can be black" if she never had been. At some point you have to put your money where your mouth is. Here, as elsewhere, the professionals, not the politicians, may have the better sense of things.

Still, the absurdities produced by the present system make me doubt whether we're going about this the right way.

Members of three racial groups receive preference: African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. (Collectively, they make up about 20 percent of the 1,200 students admitted to the class of 2006, according to the academy's Web site.) But in 2003, it is increasingly unclear what we even mean when we say "African American." In a recent discussion of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart," some of my students (all white) amused me by referring to the characters as African American. I corrected them, then realized that for them this was the only polite way to refer to black people. We on the admissions board learned as the months went on that "African American" can be quite literal. A student whose parents had emigrated from Ghana, we found, was considered a member of a "protected" minority, the same as a student whose family came here generations ago in chains. Does that mean the policy is meant to benefit not just the disadvantaged descendants of slaves but also newly arrived immigrants? Apparently not all of them. An applicant whose parents had emigrated from India was ineligible for preference. The question remains: Whom exactly is the policy meant to benefit?

Hispanics, of course, can be any skin color. Many Cuban and Dominican immigrants are, by most people's standards as well as their own, white. I have had students with Spanish parents, white by my visual "once-over," who entered Annapolis as "Hispanics." Was this the intent of the directive? If not, what was? The board also debated whether students of Brazilian origin "counted" as Hispanics. They speak Portuguese and are therefore Lusophone, not Hispanic. Yet what's the difference between a Brazilian and someone from a neighboring Spanish-speaking country? When we say "Hispanic," do we really mean "brown-colored and poorly educated"?

As for "Native Americans," they are almost by definition members of other racial groups as well, usually overwhelmingly so. Most Hawaiians, for example, are a comfortable mix of many immigrant groups to the islands. Yet we give greater weight to an applicant's, say, one-eighth protected ancestry than to his or her seven-eighths unprotected ancestry. The same is true for all mixed-race students, a growing minority.

For USNA purposes, as for those of the U.S. Census, membership in any of these categories is based on self-identification. A student may check as many boxes as he or she wishes. As long as the student checks one of the three boxes for protected minorities, he or she is assigned to an officer on the admissions staff who then actively shepherds that application through the rest of the process. In the fall, we were told that if a student checked the Native American box, we could ask for confirmation of tribal affiliation. Yet by mid- year we were being told that we could not. Early in the year, one applicant told an admissions officer she was one-eighth Hispanic. But one-eighth was enough, and in any case we later learned we couldn't even ask about the percentage.

This led to apparent howlers like the student with an un- Hispanic last name attending the flossiest private school in his part of Texas, who identified himself as Hispanic and received preferential treatment. There have also been cases of "minority" students being identified as "white" by their schools. (We debated whether we could nail these applicants for lying, but finally decided that a school's visual impression could not be taken as fact, either.)

In a year on the USNA Admissions Board, I never got a sense of the underlying philosophical justification for this clearly illogical policy. Initially we were offered the plausible reason that the Navy wanted more officers who "looked like" the sailors and Marines. Yet later, perhaps as someone realized how controversial this line of thinking was, it was withdrawn, and we were given no reason for favoring these particular groups. Was it to make up for past economic inequities? Then we should eliminate special consideration for the rich ones. To make up for the horror of slavery? Then we should eliminate it for the recent immigrants, as well as for anyone who couldn't prove having had an enslaved ancestor.

If, on the other hand, what we were really talking about was skin color, I suggested with would-be Swiftian irony that we send out paint cards with varying skin tones and ask applicants to circle the one closest to their own: Browner than a certain level would lead to preference, lighter would preclude it. We wouldn't have to dance around all these other categories that weren't really the point. The reaction, of course, was shock. We can't do that! Of course, we can't. But this is why our current situation is so untenable: If we're aiming for colorblindness, we can't get there via color- definition.

Before students reach our board, the computer generates a number (called the "whole-person multiple") based on complex algorithms that take into account their grades, their rank in class, their test scores and their athletic and extra-curricular activities. Being a child of an alumnus adds a bit to this score, but only as much as, say, an especially good essay: 500 points, where a total of 68,000 is considered a good solid admitting score and 75,000 is stellar. Rank in class is very important, which tends to benefit high- achieving students at mediocre or rural schools, but some attempt is made to equalize this by giving students credit for attending a school that sends a high proportion of its graduates to college.

For me, the most startling discovery was how immense an advantage is gained by checking a protected-minority box. First, in practice (there are few hard and fast rules), we let in members of these minorities with a much lower whole-person multiple than we usually require, sometimes as much as 15 percent lower. If a "majority" student scored 600 or more on each part of the SAT I test, math and verbal, we put a check mark and went on to consider other aspects of the application. We did so in the case of a "minority" student if the scores were in the neighborhood of 550. For a minority student with scores in the low 500 range but also compensatory achievements, we usually recommended a year at the Naval Academy Preparatory School. (Admission to USNA is guaranteed for a student with a GPA of 2.0 after a year at NAPS.)

Last year, a half-Hispanic applicant challenged the Naval Academy on the grounds that his low test scores had been cited as a reason for his rejection. The irony is that in practice we already accept lower scores from Hispanics than from white or Asian students. His were even lower than our lowered threshold. In any case, many factors can be used to "mitigate" either high or low scores. They are not, as this applicant imagined, absolute criteria. Race, to a degree, is, and his having checked the box "Hispanic" already gave him a huge advantage.

For the most spectacular effect of self-identifying as one of the three protected minorities is that the student is admitted to the academy directly, along with a certain number of athletes and young sailors and Marines (assuming he or she has been voted in by the board and passed the rigorous physical exams). That means admitted at the head of the line, without having to further compete for a sometimes hard-to-get nomination from a member of Congress or the executive branch that otherwise is the sine qua non of admission to any of the nation's military academies. Counting all the favored groups, about 50 percent of students offered admission to the Naval Academy have bypassed this nominating process, which leaves so many highly qualified non-favored students going to State U instead.

After a year on the USNA Admissions Board, I find I am in favor of eliminating all our set-asides: racial, athletic and fleet- determined. After all, admitting someone "direct" means that another candidate, probably with a higher whole-person multiple, does not get in, since most of those who must compete for nominations are "better" on paper than the direct admissions. This in turn means that, to whatever degree, the capability of the officers down the line -- those who will have their fingers on the buttons -- is at least arguably watered down. The Navy shouldn't want this; the United States shouldn't want it.

But that's not the only reason for my concern. While all aspects of affirmative action warrant reassessment, for now the focus is on racial preferences. And I am convinced that, at bottom, the administration is right: Race has become far too blunt an instrument for ensuring "diversity," even if it is used as one of several criteria (Condoleezza Rice's solution). In an immigration-altered society no longer polarized into "black" and "white," the racial categories on which affirmative-action policies depend have begun to break down.

It is philosophically justifiable to say -- as the Bush administration should be saying, but isn't -- that we want the American dream to be open to all. In the Navy's case, that means the Naval Academy, the officer corps and other leadership roles. But "solving" the problem by deciding what we want our naval leadership to look like and then letting into the academy people who will help produce that profile, is, as the current situation shows, worse than no solution at all, since it is inconsistent with the goal of ultimate colorblindness.

Some argue that if we stop doing this, the academy will once again look much the way it did during the lily-white years before integration, with a few atypical exceptions. Yet there is something worse than having the enrollment of black students at elite institutions drop in the short run. That is, sitting idly by while society remains stratified to the point where the only way to get large numbers of black and other minority students into elite institutions is by cooking the books. We need applicants who can get in on their own merits. If this means more intervention, earlier, in disadvantaged communities, so be it. In the long run, it is the only tenable solution. Bruce Fleming has just finished a memoir of his first decade teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he is currently on sabbatical. This article represents his personal views.