I'm at university right now. The most left-leaning, liberal thing I've seen is a lone reference to Trump being the primordial ooze that life emerged from.
Jonothan Haidt (an actual lecturer at a university) discusses this in some video interviews around the place.
According to him, the off-the-rails stuff
only happens at
residential colleges, and only ones that also have an administration who have pro-active systems to investigate and punish people for microaggressions and the like.
So you had young people crammed into forced accommodation where they have to get along with people for years at a time, and you also have a
punishment system for thinking wrong, which is run by the college. A typical investigation system protects the identity of the accuser, to prevent retaliation.
This situation was pretty stable, but then
social media got added to the mix. Now, you could anonymously accuse people of thought-crime, cause them to be hauled in for a lengthy official inquisition, but also simultaneously hammer them on social media, which puts immense pressure on the inquisition to find them guilty. This phenomena swept those American colleges in 2013-2014 specifically. Those colleges were caught off-guard: many tried to "appease" the complainers by removing all "offending" things, policing language more aggressively (this is when all the draconian dating rules started appearing for US colleges). Which, predictably only emboldened the complainers to become more aggressive in policing others words, thoughts, and actions.
It's not all colleges, it's just what happens when you have an easily abused "witch hunt" type tribunal system, plus Lord of the Flies type social pressures. It's not even specific to any ideology: if you had
conservative residential colleges, along with a tribunal you could report people for being "too liberal" then of course, the same thing would happen: some ultra-conservative zealots would abuse the system to tyrannize the majority and put themselves into a position of power. The group that ends up abusing any complaints procedure is by necessity related to the
types of complaints you're allowed to make.