I am a pretty traditional liberal in that I value offensive, free speech above all else. I never had a problem with Phelps, or the bible guys or the abortion sign people or whatever on K-State's campus. There were a number of protests against the Iraq War that resulted in people screaming or flipping me off or whatever and I thought that was pretty great. I don't think the public square should be a place of tip-toeing speech only, I favor expansive free speech rights.
I think K-State is largely insulated from a lot of this because it is a pretty conservative state school that welcomes everyone. I am thankful that the conservatives that wish to squelch speech mostly find K-State not to their tastes and simply leave for an overtly Christian campus (as one parent seriously wrote in to the Manhattan Mercury this fall) and there are the occasional clowns like that op ed columnist that wrote about how hard it is to be a Christian conservative at Kansas State, but these people are ridiculed and mocked, not shouted off the stage.
I don't think that this "movement" is inevitable or that it will dictate the new orthodoxy on campuses for all time, but I do think it is a reflection in the changing norms on campuses where minorities are nosier about being actually considered as a part of campus life and not just an invisible group that keeps to themselves. I think many of the older generations of academics are not prepared for a lot of this, are threatened by student voices and the power they wield in a time when many of the barriers to mass dissemination of information are removed.
It was only a few years ago that professors were gleefully emailing/facebooking the hero professor who smashed a student cell phone when it rang in their class. How much has changed since then?
I don't think professors being so tyrannical and treating students like they are garbage is all that great, so maybe things will balance out for the better?
I see some work where undergraduate students on campus can be treated with dignity and given opportunities to participate in research and actually a get a foot in the door in the field of academia and I think that as undergraduates and graduate students gain more of a voice they will balance out some of the abuses that academia has traditionally wrought on students, while perhaps creating some new problems that hopefully will get changed for the better over time.