Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

Sometimes, a thing --- a word, an institution, a bit of history --- has cultural power. It's surrounded with an aura (or valence, if you will) of gravitas and mystique, usually accumulated over decades, or millennia.

Acrivists notice that these things have cultural power and hijack them, turning them into something useful for the cause while denying that anything has changed. Consider, for example, how many people claim, in all earnestness, that disagreement is "literal violence". Disagreement is obviously not violence, but by using this word, activists can "steal" some of the emotion attached to the word "violence" and weild it for their cause.

This hijacking works for a while, until people catch on. At that point, activists, like locusts, move on to areas not yet stripped bare of meaning.

The same mechanism that at micro scale operates on words operates at macro scale on institutions.

Academia in particular has been ravaged by this process: huge parts of the academy no longer practice anything resembling science. Their studies do not reproduce. Their papers go unread. Their lectures become diatribes. Their students become zealots. The forms are present, but the substance is gone.

This article describes the early stages of such a hijacking.