Ward Connerly comes to Arizona (for no particular reason)

The Arizona Republic has this article about the anti-affirmative action initiative making its way onto the ballot. I find attitudes towards Affirmative Action fascinating. I can think of few issues that have more misconceptions associated with them. This leads to unintended consequences...

One misconception of affirmative action is that it only helps minority groups at the expense of poor white men. In college admissions in particular, men are under performing women in both qualifications for undergraduate and graduate schools, but also in the sheer number of applications. Therefore many schools have to give preference to men to balance their classes. There was a study in Georgia (sorry I cannot find it) that looked the likely outcomes of eliminating all preferences (including legacies much to the consternation of many of the people that supported the change). Basically the change would mean that the flagship liberal arts universities would have been around 65% women and primarily from 3 counties. Just so you know Georgia has 159 counties.

My favorite portion of the article is below:

University officials say it could have less impact on schools here than in California because gender and race generally are not admission factors. But some programs, such as Arizona's law schools, can take race and gender into consideration along with many other criteria. Supporters of the initiative maintain that colleges use race and gender for admission more often than they let on.

and this

Connerly said he doubts the universities' claims that they don't use race or gender in admitting students, although he has no specific examples."I have no doubt that race is somehow a subliminal factor in the consideration," he said.

If race is a 'subliminal factor' how would that be eliminated by law?