There's another even more pernicious effect that is happening in academic hirings. It is the result of the perfect and awful convergence of two separate trends. One is the silent cancel culture that the author speaks of. The other is a morbid fear institutions have of hair-trigger lawsuits that potential employees can levy against future employers claiming discrimination. So a university will be afraid to hire a candidate that doesn't check all of the politically correct 'boxes', but also will refrain from telling this candidate the specifics of why they weren't hired (or published). So there are a whole swathe of independently minded individuals in academia who have an odd feeling that they are being side-stepped, but are never told directly why, because their potential employers and publishers don't want to be litigiously responsible. It creates this horrible 'elephant in the room' atmosphere where people aren't sure if their ideas are received or rejected. It goes beyond silencing, really. Also, because the rules and nuances of 'equity-speak' change daily, academics can never be entirely sure that they aren't guilty of 'something'. Did they accidentally 'dead-name' a person who has since come out as trans in a conversation? Did they show racial insensitivity in the incredibly subtle way that insensitivity can be parsed? Did they accidentally lean phallocentric, patriarchal or colonial in a paper? Did they use too many 'white male' sources in their research? And because anyone can be offended by virtually anything, you can never be sure. I'm not white, but I do skew markedly cis-gender (though I am a queer ally). Is it enough? What if someone starts to find that my markedly "binary", "masculine" and "non-fluid" appearance is 'unsafe'? Where will it end?