The American higher education community found a curious mix of good and bad news in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last summer, in "Parents Involved v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education", about the use of race-based policies by public elementary and secondary schools. This article discusses this curious mix of good and bad news that the American higher education community found in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling. The good news: "Grutter lives!" Most observers agreed that the ruling reaffirmed the high court's 2003 "Grutter v. Bollinger" decision that had sustained race-sensitive admissions policies at the University of Michigan Law School. The bad news: it was far from clear just what legal principles "lived," because of sharp splits among the justices and pervasive ambiguities in the earlier ruling.