  In these off-hand comments, universities saw a green light for pushing ahead aggressively with their affirmative action programs.  Justice Powell’s basic holding could not have been plainer: any system like the Medical School’s that assessed applications along two different tracks defined by race or that used numerical racial quotas must fail constitutional muster. Yet by the mid-1980s universities across the land had in place systems of admissions and scholarships that exhibited one or both of these features. When the University of Maryland’s Banneker scholarships—awarded only to African-American students—were held in violation of the Constitution in 1994, the house of cards forming university affirmative action began to  fall.[18]  In 1996, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the University of Texas Law School’s two-track admissions program.  In 1998, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit struck down a Boston plan assigning students to selective high schools by  race.[19]  In 2001, two more schools saw their admissions programs invalidated by federal courts: the University of  Georgia[20]  and the University of Michigan Law  School.[21]  In many of these cases, educational institutions were using schemes that made race something very much more than Justice Powell’s “plus”  factor.[22]  The Fifth Circuit Court’s ruling in the University of Texas case (Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F 3d 932 [Fifth Circuit, 1996]) threw a cloud even over this small window for affirmative action, boldly asserting that the Bakke holding was now dead as law and that race could not be used at all in admissions.