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There was obviously higher direct participation here, but the general point remains true. There was also significant support among the non-participants. Their non-participant was undertandable, since you could get beaten up, arrested, jailed and suspended.
In terms of censorship, you could fail for writing papers and producing arts that had a definite politically contentious edge. One of the more interesting ways to perform this censorship and provide plausible deniability, was to cut off modern history with the end of WWII, or 1945-50. This foreclosed any discussion of modern American art, literature, anti-communism, civil rights, the war or any other more pressing controversy. Another method of academic censorship was to insist on objectivity in the humanities and enforce formalist or new criticism in the arts. The insistance of these academic values schemes effectively de-politicized the arts and humanities and put political value judgements in the hand of a magisterial elite, in charge of the entire spectrum of intellectual engagement with life and society.
It has been conveniently forgotten that it was students who were reading Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Adorno, Hauser, Paz, as well as Hesse, Beckette, and Robbe-Grilette. Or considering the African Americans, it was students who were reading du Bois, Baldwin, Malcom X, and Cleaver.
The key issue in US higher education was how to get rid of these people. Political figures like Ronald Reagan knew exactly how to do that and he spent a significant amount of his time in office doing just that. First you raise student fees until they are unaffordable by the masses. Why should the government and the power elite pay for its enemy's education? Indeed. Next you enforce absurd entrance requirements. And last you cut budgets and systemically undermine the whole concept of public higher education as a social good.
So now we have an infantile student population racking up tremendous debts for an almost meaningless job certificate. Education? We don't need no stinking education. We need a job. And they are right.
Stories about today's student population that blame students for their quissence, obfuscate the policies and planning that produced such results.
CG