There can be multiple distinct problems and a variety of resulting downstream effects at one time. I don’t think you’ve correctly identified the root cause here, either. It’s several levels up.
> As a thought experiment, consider the possibility that in the 1990s the administration was more responsive to student protests, and more amicable to cancelling, for example, a scheduled talk by a proponent of pseudoscience.
I seriously doubt that students in the 1990s, the era of the X-Files and Art Bell, were out protesting “pseudoscience”. This was a time when conspiracies were counterculture and cool, although few (at least few that I knew) really took them seriously or saw them as a threat. Rather than protest, the few students who were even aware of it were probably most likely to smoke a bowl and giggle through a speaker like this, as an exercise in irony.
As for the rest of your text, I don’t accept that we’re at the point of violent struggle, especially on campus. You could argue for it elsewhere, maybe, but it’s laughable that the modern campus could be a valid site for this, except for maybe the ones that have faced violent suppression of speech by authorities. This is especially when the protest actions are themselves targeted towards suppressing speech, and not towards the tangible infrastructure of oppression.
Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters, or departments doing research for ICE, instead of going after Twitter shitposters? It almost seems like they are walking into a trap designed to paint them (justly in this case) as unreasonable, violent, and against shared freedoms. They are being dogwalked into losing their own freedoms, and you’re here supporting the dogwalkers.