The suppression today involves professionally disasterous public things like firings, censures, formal censorship, pressure to sign petitions, reputational destruction, doxing, physically threatening pressure and screaming and possibly violence, etc. If only it were eye rolls.
Specifically, you're missing how then, e.g. white conservative majority power didn't need formality to suppress. That's how majority power works. It can just good-ol-boy network its way to suppression. (And note how it doesn't need to be precise when it's like that. It doesn't have to "make an argument," it can, e.g. just deny tenure to the loud black lady on some random grounds.)
Formality is usually what the WEAKER side must resort to. Now I think there's a reasonable argument that that process is much stronger in a negative way today -- but context.
What you're doing is trying to isolate and relate what I was going through, but through your own lens and you can't much do it that way.
For example, I was fortunate to go to an Ivy League school and as a black person that felt like a huge privilege, one that I damn sure was going to stay within a certain set of behaviors to keep. You can't measure "academic freedom" without that kind of context.
Again, maybe I/we misread and perhaps had more room to speak than we thought. Probably did. But again, just painting the picture for you.