Nine years ago in these pages, we — columnists for STAT at the time — praised the American Diabetes Association for standing up to a researcher in Brazil who had sued the group in U.S. federal court for issuing expressions of concern on four of his published articles. We even named the ADA the inaugural winner of our Doing the Right Thing award.

Times certainly have changed, and the ADA is no longer what we’d call a profile in courage. The nation’s leading diabetes group now finds itself mired in a self-made mess involving its decision to oust a group of physicians from its annual meeting earlier this year.

As STAT reported, “police officers and security personnel took conference badges from five physicians and scientists sharing copies of an opinion piece published on April 29 in Diabetes Care. All were ordered to leave.”

The society said at the time distributing the reprints breached its commitment to “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission.” Of note, the meeting’s scheduled keynote speaker was Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, and the opinion piece was harshly critical of the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal funding for science. (Bhattacharya bowed out and was replaced by a deputy.)

Now, more than 200 ADA members are calling for top officials to resign their posts, as well as for an investigation into the events at the meeting, a “full apology” to the attendees who were evicted, and “the restoration of editorial independence at Diabetes Care,” its flagship journal. The ADA, which did apologize for the incident, said it is awaiting a report about the matter from its audit and governance committee.

Which brings us back a decade, to 2015. Back then, the ADA appeared genuinely committed to defending itself and the editorial integrity of another of its journals, Diabetes, which had been named in a defamation suit two years earlier by a researcher in São Paulo named Mario Saad. (Saad claimed the journal’s actions were “unfair and a persecution” and hinted that he was being targeted because he lived in South America.)

As we wrote then, the easy way out for the society would have been simply to capitulate to Saad and remove the expressions of concern on his articles. It did not. Rather, the group fought the suit in court — no doubt an expensive and stressful proposition — and was rewarded when the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts threw out the case. (Diabetes eventually retracted the four papers in question.)

So two years later, we gave the ADA our first Doing the Right Thing award, calling them “champions of decisive action when it comes to policing their literature.”

What we did not anticipate was that the organization would apparently interpret “policing their literature” as involving actual police to prevent people from reading opinion pieces.

We’re not rescinding the award. But — and we won’t sugarcoat it — the episode would disqualify anyone at the ADA involved in this debacle from our recently announced Ctrl-Z Award, designed to recognize those who have corrected the record at great personal or professional cost. (The award is a better-named and better-designed descendant of the DiRT Award, which never progressed past its inaugural year, perhaps because of its name.)

We are well aware that 2015 — a year before Donald Trump was first elected president — feels like a different era when it comes to freedom of speech. When prosecutors can file federal charges against a man who briefly posts a picture of seashells on a beach in North Carolina, and the Department of Justice subpoenas journalists and their family members, the stakes of crossing the administration can feel — and be — enormous. One might even be forgiven for imagining that is the point of the administration’s bullying oversteps.

But fears of future intimidation do not excuse preemptive capitulation. The ADA has not offered a coherent explanation for its actions at the meeting, which leaves us all to speculate based on the juxtaposition of an op-ed critical of the Trump administration being handed out as a senior member of that administration was about to speak — an official with hands on purse strings.

ADA’s chief executive officer Charles Henderson suggested as much in his apology:

“The ADA will continue to advocate for robust NIH funding, support the pursuit of scientific discovery, and advocate for the broader research community whose work advances knowledge, drives innovation, and ultimately improves the lives of people living with diabetes, obesity, and related conditions.”

What better way to advocate for said funding than to allow criticism of an administration that keeps looking for ways to cut it? Indeed, cowardice in this situation sends exactly the wrong message. If the ADA is willing to muzzle its members for fear of costing the field government funding, how far is it willing to go? And what might it do to get more money?

We hope the ADA’s ongoing review — which has already made some of its members impatient — and ensuing actions reflect a commitment to free and evidence-based dialogue. It’s time the ADA brought back the justifiable swagger of 2015.

Adam Marcus is the editorial director of the Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, and senior editorial director of primary care at Medscape. Ivan Oransky is the executive director of the center and distinguished journalist in residence at New York University’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute.