A primary way academia sells "impact" of research is through moral outrage. Since academic impact, ought in most cases, be relatively fringe and internal to academic priorities -- the demand from society/government to contrive some means to assess its value has lead to an explosion of "morality washing" connecting some topic of investigation to some assumed moral value society is supposed to have.

Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.