You may have heard by now that Yale has admitted a former senior Taliban official as a student--a story originally broken by the New York Times. Yale is also one of the universities that has banned ROTC on campus--ostensibly for its discriminatory policy on gays.

Yet there is apparently no problem with the Taliban who virtually imprisoned the entire female population of Afghanistan.

Yale is staying mum on this, which indicates that they have some indication that this is a political mess, but what I am curious about is the thought process that leads to such a decision.

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

I suppose it might be interesting to talk to a literate Taliban guy for a while, just to see what makes him tick, but the insensitivity and arrogance of admitting one as a student to one of this country's elite universities is truly shocking.

Perhaps this is what George Clooney meant by being proud to be out of touch...