Closed meetings are inherently bad. Selectively exclusive meetings are worse.

Selectively exclusive meetings on a college campus are worse yet.

We had one of those “worse yet” meetings here Thursday night. Iowa State President Martin Jischke met with the university’s black faculty and staff about a smattering of issues including the much-talked-about campus racial tensions.

Also present were other administrators and some students.

It looked at first to be an open meeting, one chock full of rational discourse, healthy debate and some good suggestions for improvement.

Did any of that happen?

We don’t know.

Our reporter got kicked out of the meeting because, and here’s the weird part, she was a reporter.

At the onset, she was invited in, presumably to contribute to the meeting’s productivity.

But once she sat down and starting writing on one of those skinny notebooks that only reporters use, she was asked to leave.

As just a student she was welcomed. As a student reporter she was shunned.

That stinks.

There is nothing fair about excluding some students from a meeting based on their job titles.

There is nothing fair about holding an open meeting — except for the press.

When Daily editors protested, they were told that the group meeting with President Jischke wasn’t an official governmental body, therefore the meeting wasn’t covered by Iowa open meetings and open records laws.

That’s probably true. It is, however, the state attorney general’s recommendation that even ad hoc groups, such as this one, voluntarily abide by open meetings rules out of the spirit of openness.

Apparently that recommendation didn’t mean much Thursday night.

But we’ll even concede the legality of kicking our reporter out of the meeting. Still, that doesn’t make it right.

At an institution that preaches openness and inclusiveness, why were we excluded?

Closing the meeting invites suspicion. What, then, was so top secret that it could only be discussed behind closed doors?

It was suggested that those meeting with the president would feel more free to speak their minds without the possibility of their comments appearing in the newspaper.

That, however, is one of the poorest justifications we’ve heard in some time.

There’s a one-word response: cowardice.

And maybe that’s what were really talking about.

The whole issue of race relations at our beloved university has become so polarized that we can’t talk openly about it without fear of being misinterpreted or judged unfairly.

That truly is a problem.

Putting up a wall of silence, however, and locking up discussion behind doors of exclusion is not the solution.

At least it’s not a good one.