Of course college administration has changed. Increasingly it’s become incredibly risk-averse, top heavy, and obsessed with both money and disembodied metrics over academic merit. (I don’t mean “merit” as in “meritocracy”, I mean merit as in are we actually tangibly advancing student and public knowledge.) It’s probably changing again, likely into something worse. That still doesn’t justify violence! It may however justify voluntary disenrollment, which is beginning to happen, especially given how bloated tuition costs are feeding oversized budgets.

Regarding your examples, the UC Davis thing was an outlier from over a decade ago, during the slow shift in institutional power as we moved away from the Bush era. The Chancellor was dismissed and replaced a few years later. I find it hard to connect that to anything current, in the same way that Kent State isn’t particularly relevant, or UW student involvement in the Battle for Seattle.

Being opposed to someone becoming provost is not the same as blocking them from speaking. I’d be interested to see if you can dig up something on actual deplatforming attempts versus protests for the other instances you gave. Again, peaceful protest is always acceptable.

Anyways, it sounds like you’ve had very different experiences than me, and maybe some different foundational beliefs. It’s hard to square the two.