It is quite funny to think on just how difficult it could be to express a to express a non-conformist thought as an Politics undergraduate at Sussex 20 years ago. I remember some poor young schmo coming to our Politics Society from another university, and getting basically killed for pointing out that it wasn't necessarily hypocrisy to send your children to private school whilst believing that they should be abolished. Glen Newey (blogs for LRB, John Gray accolyte) wisely, if perhaps somewhat cravenly, found himself in the role of this opponent. The whole event shocked me; it was my first and last time at that Society (Newey also found a new home pretty quickly afterwards if I recall correctly).
I don't really know because it's entirely possible our paths just never crossed again, but I remember a bright women in my first year politics classes who was definitely a Shire Tory at completely the wrong university; maybe she just hid in the library (not unlike myself), but it might have been better for her to leave and reapply to a more sympathetic institution.
I also upset some peeps in a US Politics seminar by devils-advocating against the weeny-liberal consensus once. It would have been tiring to do it a lot.
I don't really think about these things too much, but I tend to think that the kind of power games in play then and now echo the real world just fine - it's just that different people hold the power. And it's such a tiny thing - I know people pay a lot in fees these days, but I don't remember political societies being particularly central to student life to be honest; as far as I can tell, most students paid this shit little to no mind (and rightly so). And this was before YouTube. Getting no-platformed now pretty much guarantees you a sympathetic worldwide audience on the internet, which seems to me more than a fair trade.
This idea of a 'debate' where opposing ideas are sincerely engaged with has pretty much always been a fantastical notion, which, as suggested earlier in the thread, is something the Right generally understand perfectly well. Milo, for example, talks about the importance reason and evidence but has, when being less careful, stated that 'post-fact culture' is 'wonderful' i.e. feelings matter, but only the feelings of those who agree with him, or potentially could.