Why exclusive schools are excluding inclusion.

Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

Americans tend to disapprove of achieving group fairness by sacrificing individual fairness, so racial preferences in admissions and hiring are broadly unpopular; even Black Americans, who often receive the largest boost from college affirmative action programs, express ambivalence in polls. Rather than having an honest conversation about the necessity of trade-offs, the Supreme Court punted — and schools have obfuscated, racially balancing classes and faculty while pretending that’s not what they’re doing.

This might be a small dishonesty in service of a noble larger goal, but when your job is to seek truths and transmit them to the world, a minor reputation for lying is a major problem.

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The resulting reputational damage was probably manageable as long as the prevarications were confined to a few well-meaning fibs about admissions policies. But lies have a way of snowballing, as each ensuing contradiction with reality forces us to invent a new falsehood to protect the old ones. See how the Harvard admissions officers who, forbidden to forthrightly cap the number of White and Asian students, instead insisted that Asian applicants deserve lower personal ratings than other candidates. Most of the obfuscations are not this offensive, but they are all corrosive, and the thicker they’re slathered on, the more they weaken the underlying institution.

Members of academic communities are now supposed to maintain an elaborate false consciousness. They must insist that affirmative action was the only thing keeping the ivory tower from reverting to its lily-white antecedents but deny that any individual student or faculty member ever benefited from it. They should support admitting students with weaker academic qualifications but professors can be fired for noticing if those students struggle more with coursework. And, of course, having established the principle that hurtful facts should not be said, universities have applied it more and more broadly, resulting in biologist Carole Hooven being hounded out of Harvard for saying, among other things, that biological sex was real and binary (while also noting that this does not prevent us from respecting someone’s gender identity and using their pronouns).

Such double-think regimes are vulnerable to what economist Timur Kuran calls a “preference cascade in reverse”: As people realize their neighbors share their skepticism, they start voicing their........

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