John J. Moores has been good to the University of Houston. Since he graduated and went on to make a fortune founding BMC software and buying the San Diego Padres, he has donated untold amounts of money to the university. He helped build a fountain on the part of campus where he proposed to his wife. He donated enough money to the music program that it's called the Moores School of Music.

Unfortunately, Moores falls on the left side of the political spectrum. He donated heavily to Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 and was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents by Gray Davis.

With that in mind, I was surprised to read that Moores has apparently taken a stand against UC's blatant lawlessness in disregarding Proposition 209. He's paying a price for it:

Californians probably think racial preferences in college admissions ended in 1996 when voters approved Proposition 209. But John Moores, chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California, says some UC administrators have been manipulating the system and defying the law for the past eight years. Mr. Moores's fellow regents voted 8-6 to censure him for expressing these views in a recent Forbes magazine opinion piece. A medal is more like what the man deserves.

In his article, Mr. Moores details how Berkeley, the UC system's flagship school, is admitting hundreds of blacks, Latinos and Native Americans with SAT scores as many as 400 points below the whites and Asians who are being rejected. This is because the liberals who run Berkeley, and their enablers on the Board of Regents, all worship at the altar of "diversity."

They're more interested in some ideal racial mix on campus than in matriculating students who are best prepared to do the work and most likely to graduate. In the real world, Mr. Moores had the temerity to write, this idealism translates into "kids who struggled with eighth-grade math hav[ing] to compete with kids who aced advanced-placement calculus."

While my own views on affirmative action are somewhat conflicted, the law is the law and congratulations to Moores for standing up for it.