(FORTUNE Magazine) – Is the Bush Administration really against race and sex quotas? That might seem an implausible lead sentence to be composing only two months after the President stoutly vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 on the grounds that it would unleash ''the destructive force of quotas.'' And yet, as so often happens in analyses of this Administration's stances, the answer turns out to be richly complex -- and susceptible to the interpretation that somebody up high is just drifting along without a clear position. Herewith, reports from three battle zones in the quota war. -- First, the U.S. Department of Labor. The department's main impact on quotas lies in its monitoring of the federal contract compliance program, under which just about every large corporation in America gets goals and timetables for hiring and promotion of minorities. This is a program based on executive orders, not congressional legislation, and Bush could eliminate it with a * stroke of the pen. Okay, he doesn't feel up to taking on the civil rights establishment over contract compliance. (Reagan didn't feel up to it either.) But Bush could at least name Labor Secretaries not predisposed to support quotas. And his latest nominee, Representative Lynn Martin of Illinois, turns out to be a lady who voted for the civil rights bill he just vetoed. -- Second, the U.S. Department of Education. Here the confusion centered on the recent decision by a hard-nosed black assistant secretary to bar federal funds for colleges offering race-based scholarships. Was the decision good? Was it Administration policy? Nobody seemed to know. ''There was serious hysteria here,'' one of the Bushmen told the Washington Post after a meeting on the decision. Eventually they split the difference, deciding to allow federal aid when the scholarships were privately funded. -- Third, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Strange things are happening at EEOC. Long a hothouse that bred only quota fans, the commission recently acquired a chairman, Evan J. Kemp Jr., who really does seem out to shake up things. He had an occasion for doing so several weeks ago, when the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the EEOC by Linda Gottfredson, a sociologist based at the University of Delaware. The article pointed to a new effort by the agency's bureaucracy to rewrite the regs on tests and other job selection procedures so that any tests on which minorities did poorly would be judged ''unfair'' -- even if the test was not biased against the affected group. When Kemp saw the article describing this new engine for quotas, he appears to have hit the roof. He immediately wrote a letter to the Journal announcing that the policy was henceforth inapplicable. The letter included this remarkable indictment of his own agency: ''Unlike the police chief in Casablanca who professed to be shocked to learn about gambling at Rick's, we do know that policies promoting race and gender preferences have come about in the 25 years that EEOC has enforced Title VII ((of the 1964 Civil Rights Act)).'' (We got the letter, not yet printed in the Journal as we write, from an EEOC press officer.) Although Kemp is chairman, his view appears to be in a minority at the EEOC, so that weird distinction between test unfairness and test bias cannot yet be viewed as beaten down for good. And the fact that an antiquota chairman cannot count on support from most of the other commissioners -- all appointed by Bush -- possibly says something else about drift in high places.