I think there is a dual purpose. Maybe triple: 1. The Orwellian sense of constraining thought. Personally I think this gives the people making these rules too

I think there is a dual purpose. Maybe triple: 1. The Orwellian sense of constraining thought. Personally I think this gives the people making these rules too much credit. 2. "Virtue signaling" or whatever you want to call it. There is a self-reinforcing desire to show everyone how progressive (or devout generally) one is and it spirals out of control 3. The origin of a lot of this stuff is essentially agitators who want to cause trouble and find things to get unhappy about generally. Another way of looking at it is that it's just a bunch of trolls. I think it starts with trolling, and then terrified, risk averse administrators end up at my point 2 above because they don't want to risk standing up to the trolls.