The Supreme Court's members generally are too decorous to exclaim "I told you so." But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stands perched on the edge of an I-told-you-so moment, thanks to the court's decision to take up a challenge to a race-conscious college-admission policy that poses some of the same questions he had accused fellow justices of ducking before. Justice Kennedy, the expected swing vote, warned in a 2003 case that the court should have done more to define how race could be considered in admissions. Justice Kennedy's reaction to the unsettled points of contention in the case, involving undergraduate admissions at the University of Texas at Austin, could determine whether the court imposes substantial new limits on colleges' use of affirmative-action preferences or even bars colleges from giving any consideration to applicants' ethnicity or race. When the Supreme Court last cleared the way for colleges to use race-conscious admission policies, in its 5-4 ruling in the 2003 case "Grutter v. Bollinger," involving the University of Michigan's law school, Justice Kennedy was a minority within the minority. If either a reconsideration of the research on diversity or impatience with how much leeway colleges have assumed under "Grutter" prompts Justice Kennedy to question the wisdom of allowing colleges to give any consideration to race, the era of race-conscious college-admission policies may be over.