"You've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night." So begins Derek Bok and Dr. William Bowen's new book, The Shape of the River, one of the first books to demonstrate the power of race-sensitive admissions practices. The former presidents of Harvard and Princeton universities evoke the image of Mississippi riverboat pilots winding through fogs, slow eddies, and hidden bluffs.

Perhaps that is what 1998 felt like to those who fought to provide access to Blacks in higher education only to watch in dismay as 30 years of progress was dismantled by successful legal -- and voter -- challenges to affirmative action. Those challenges began, of course, two years ago with California's Proposition 209, which slowed the number of Blacks and Latinos admitted to the elite University of California campuses to a trickle.

This year, the movement gathered momentum as the battleground shifted to Washington State. Although affirmative action supporters appeared more organized and were better financed than their peers in California had been, opponents again won a decisive victory when voters passed Initiative 200.

Brusied and battered, supporters of affirmative action were again surprised when the struggle that has long been waged on university and graduate school turf shifted to the virgin terrain of public school districts. Students and

parents in Boston and Virginia -- among other places -- filed lawsuits saying they were unfairly denied admission to well-respected schools. In Boston late last month, a three-judge panel struck down the affirmative action policy at Boston Latin School, the city's most prestigious high school.

By the end of the year it was clear to many that the landscape had changed and that new strategies are needed to continue to ensure minority students access to the nation's colleges and universities.

"Those of us who are proponents [of affirmative action] have to clarify the terms of the debate and try to make it clear that it is not a question of preferences or of righting wrongs that happened in the mid-1800s," says Margaret Montoya, a professor of law at the University of New Mexico's School of Law.