If someone says "here's a portal where you can report wrongspeak" my general intuition is that they are then going to punish people for wrongspeak.

Pre-emptively characterizing certain sorts of communication as totalitarian without any exploration of its content or merits is one kind of rhetorical strategy.

>Would you prefer that they report publicly and drag people into the court of public opinion without an investigation instead?

Yes thats exactly what free speech is about. It's the public that decides what it thinks about it and not some secret council.

I doubt they were objecting to the speech itself as much as the system that had apparently been set up to facilitate it. Or in other words, you say "university policies produce punishment or non-punishment" and it seems to me it was precisely those policies that they were objecting to.