So people would dismiss you? Did they do anything else?
Did they try to get you punished? Did they try to get you kicked out of school? Did they try to shout you down or pull fire alarms to prevent others from hearing what you had to say? Did they physically attack you?
What you're doing is trying to isolate and relate what I was going through, but through your own lens and you can't much do it that way.
For example, I was fortunate to go to an Ivy League school and as a black person that felt like a huge privilege, one that I damn sure was going to stay within a certain set of behaviors to keep. You can't measure "academic freedom" without that kind of context.
Again, maybe I/we misread and perhaps had more room to speak than we thought. Probably did. But again, just painting the picture for you.
The suppression today involves professionally disasterous public things like firings, censures, formal censorship, pressure to sign petitions, reputational destruction, doxing, physically threatening pressure and screaming and possibly violence, etc. If only it were eye rolls.
Specifically, you're missing how then, e.g. white conservative majority power didn't need formality to suppress. That's how majority power works. It can just good-ol-boy network its way to suppression. (And note how it doesn't need to be precise when it's like that. It doesn't have to "make an argument," it can, e.g. just deny tenure to the loud black lady on some random grounds.)
Formality is usually what the WEAKER side must resort to. Now I think there's a reasonable argument that that process is much stronger in a negative way today -- but context.
I support government subsidies (either explicit or through beneficial taxable status) of academic institutions in the hopes that they can create a liberal culture where any and all ideas are open for consideration. If as institutions they don't want to create a place where freedom of thought is paramount, that's fine; but at that point I don't see any particular reason they should be eligible for subsidies.
As for you, you should feel free to attend or not, but I'm not interested in subsidizing you sitting in a classroom but only hearing ideas that never challenge you.