The subject of university admissions in Michigan is a crock to me.

Those who support the consideration of race as a factor in admissions will argue that this ensures diversity, since straight competition tends to limit the number of minorities.

Those who oppose the idea argue that affirmative action in any form keeps us from becoming the color-blind society that the civil rights struggle was about — a movement that shot for judgment based on the content of one’s character, not color.

Both arguments reveal how far removed we have gotten from the real issue. Diversity in and of itself is neither good nor bad, especially since so, so many exemplary black and white Americans went to institutions, from grade school through college, in which the student body was largely made up of people who looked like them.

At heart, the issue is whether or not academically inferior black students should be guaranteed admission into our best universities rather than public universities.

Black athletes, of course, need no rule changes in their respective sports because, often nearly as long as they might have been in public school, they studied and met the demands of the games they played.

The problem outside the world of sports is that no one seems to want to look at a simple fact: If black students in public school were to study as rigorously and be trained as forcefully and as unsentimentally as their athletic counterparts, they would set the academic world on fire, and the flames would rise as high as those of the Asians and the whites.

Nobody wants to talk about that because the real issue is what happens in those first 12 years, in grade school and middle school and high school.

The nation needs a dose of what New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is giving our public schools: Put up and show up, or pack up and get out.

Those who purport to speak for the disadvantaged need to call out those responsible for the terrible quality of public education — the teachers and the administrators themselves, aided and abetted by the grand dragon of arrogant incompetence and disengagement we call the United Federation of Teachers.

Public education has always been essential to realizing the human potential acknowledged by the idea of democracy, and those teachers who are good and who work hard know as well as I do how willing their union is to put up with the intellectual genocide imposed on so-called minority children.

It is also true that the anti-intellectual aspects of minority cultures have to be seen as suicidal and redefined as such.

Yes, we have a long way to go, and as the Michigan controversy proves, we still have not begun to fight.

— Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His

e-mail address is scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com.