A little-noticed event took place during the lawsuit brought against Harvard by opponents of affirmative action. While a federal court in Boston was grappling with whether the college had been unlawfully curbing the admission of Asian Americans, Harvard suddenly changed the lyrics of its alma mater, which had stood for more than a century. It edited out its paean to the Puritans.

That action doesn’t seem on its face to have been connected to the case just decided in the federal court for the District of Massachusetts. The court cleared the university of unlawful discrimination and issued a ringing endorsement of diversity. The case had riveted higher education, and the organisation that filed the suit, Students for Fair Admissions, says it will appeal.

The drama over Harvard’s alma mater itself involves one of the loveliest hymns ever sung. An alumnus of our acquaintance, who was admitted by Harvard when all other universities rejected him, has found himself humming the hymn over decades — while walking down the street, in the kitchen, even in combat during the Cold War. The hymn’s last stanza ends with a plea against “moss-covered error.”

Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
As the world on Truth’s current glides by,
Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
Till the stock of the Puritans die.

Harvard, it turns out, was vexed by the nod to the Puritans who founded the school 1636. It feared the line suggested that the “commitment to truth, and to being the bearer of its light, is the special province of those of Puritan stock.” In a post on the Internet, Harvard called the notion “false.” In 2017, the university established a contest to find a new lyric to end its heroic hymn.

We can understand the instinct. The change was sought by the university’s task force on “inclusion and belonging.” Persons of all sorts of magnificent stock, after all, have helped build Harvard. Harvard insisted it did “not wish to write Puritans out of its history.” The result, though, is that today “Fair Harvard” now ends with the injunction to be the herald of light and love “till the stars in the firmament die.”

The reference to the Puritans is — poof — gone.

To us it’s a reminder of a difficult truth about inclusion that lies at the center of the lawsuit over affirmative action. We may thrill, as the Sun does, to diversity in our neighborhoods, newsrooms, universities, cities, and country. Yet it seems that all too often, when affirmative efforts are made to include groups, affirmative efforts are needed to keep other groups out, or curtail their numbers.

That is the essence of the complaint by Students for Fair Admissions, which sued Harvard over Asian Americans. The judge concluded Harvard’s policies don’t violate the law. The plaintiffs, though, are going to appeal, and they may find more sympathy at the Supreme Court — five of whose members sang “Fair Harvard” back before its lyrics were, in the name of inclusion, purged of the Pilgrims.