Changes in China in the early 2000s — a rising standard of living, an easing of restrictions on adoption within the country, more sex-selective abortion — meant that fewer families abandoned healthy babies, Professor Smolin said.
Professors abandoned attendance policies and gave lectures online.
But four years ago Chinese and Japanese professors abandoned attempts to come up with a unified interpretation of the past, and the recent spats are likely to make cross-country academic panels even less effective.
"We don't know yet why they were abandoned," said Jeff Dean, a professor of dendrochronology.
Professor Putnam abandoned his support of the Progressive Labor Party in 1972; he does not still support it.
Professor Forrester abandoned digital computing in 1956, in part because he believed that the major innovations in the field had been made.
It is hard for the reader to buy the basic premise of Solanka's career: that he is a former Cambridge professor who abandoned the academic life to become the wealthy creator of a wildly popular doll named Little Brain.
A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906 1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution.
By attacking California professor Christine Blasey Ford, Trump abandoned the self-restraint he had showed for days and pushed Kavanaugh's nomination deeper into turmoil.
"Having sold Social Security as a retirement plan, I think it is important that the promise not be abandoned," Mr. Gustman, the Dartmouth professor, told me in a telephone interview.
