It's not just academia, it's the modern "meritocracy" more broadly. When getting into a campus club at a top college requires four rounds of interviews, you look for easy ways to signal your eliteness and being hip to the new verbal trends is a great way for the well-heeled to extend their advantage over the less-enlightened.
This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.
All social structures survive through their self-perpetuation...it's a general critique with a lot of explanatory power that I've had on my mind.
Any kind of senseless decorum or self-defeating policy comes down to the intersection of self-perpetuating framings of reality with actors who either promote it out of self-interest, or take it upon themselves to become footsoldiers on faithful behalf of that idea, extending it to unreasonable, totalizing lengths in the process of protecting it like a child.
And that can manifest as "my way is right behavior and that is wrong behavior", or "we are good because they are bad", or any number of other illogical defenses. It's just automatic once you decide some thought has to be defended, and when it forms a really persistent, robust structure you end up with a religion, national mythos, economic norm etc. The structure is looking out for itself first, and the current elites hold the most gravity in deciding whether to further perpetuate or not. But elites aren't immune to being true believers either - they have to be able to let go and examine what they want to accomplish, and if the belief they have is too firmly tied to their immediate self-interest, they can't do it.
My reading here is derived somewhat from Heather Marsh's writings, but with different focus and phrasing.
This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.