Hi:
Yes, you can do this in the XML directly. (In general whatever you can do with the field properties GUI, you can also do directly with XML.)

The XML would look something like this:

<tables xmlns="http://labkey.org/data/xml">
  <table tableName="Demographics" tableDbType="NOT_IN_DB">
    <columns>
      <column columnName="date">
        <excludeFromShifting>true</excludeFromShifting>
      </column>
    </columns>
  </table>
</tables>

Thanks, Steve