A physicists exposed that group as a collection of intellectual pretenders years ago when he used some quantum physics terms to pretend to support one of their idiocies. His paper passed peer review and was featured in their comic book. He then exposed them. Heh.
Your incident you cite is just the tip of the iceberg.
The MLA became a focus of Leftist Wet Dreams over much of the last 50 years, since the late sixties as I recall. It has been a joke of an organization for all that time.
Since the sixties, the Leftists and counter-culture mavins of all universities have had to have a place to rally and this poor vestige of an academic association has been the rally point.