Given that it's in use at Cambridge and several other HPC centers around the UK, I'm going to disagree. I think most people are cosmopolitan enough to set aside the UK's niche insult community to move forward with real work. I doubt there's any single-syllable morpheme which doesn't translate to something offensive somewhere.
It's a horrible term that was used for years to denigrate disabled people and that it is used now in cloistered and privileged academic settings is no excuse for an ignorant dismissal like that of the hurt, bigotry and exclusion it conveys.
Perhaps a generational (and maybe class?) thing as well; it and related terms were vicious and influential enough to have motivated The Spastics Society to change their name to Scope in the mid-nineties [1]; I guess growing awareness of disability discrimination and bigotry also contributed to it being recognized as beyond the pale and disappearance from casual conversation with the corollary effect of some people outside those demographics being ignorant of how awful those terms were.
Well the UK has done an amazing job at getting rid of almost all uses of the word "spastic" due to the campaign against it, so it could be for that reason
