I suspect this was completely honest. You will not believe what comes out of the mouths of some of these students. Straw-manning is necessary; do you think either participant or the audience has the patience to sit and thoughtfully and carefully consider all sides of any issue in any debate? If that debate were publicized nobody would watch it. And it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you try to be respectful and thoughtful and the other person screams and yells and abuses and strawmans then you will lose the 'debate' by any metric not implemented by a philosophy professor. Look at the presedential debates. Nasty quips and attacks win, thoughtful consideration and long policy dialogue loses. It's not a coincidence.

This is a classic trap. Some positions are simply not worth discussing thoughtfully. Not all positions are equal. When you say "both sides" you have already lost; plenty of people use this tendancy to give both sides to every issue equal credence and carefully consider both, so they inject some absurd ridiculous view as the other side and abuse your tendancy to respect them to gain credence for it. Then the overton window is shifted and they have already won before the debate begins. If you even accept the premise that a student should be able to tell a professor what they are and are not allowed to discuss in their class you have already lost the debate, there's no use respecting that view, it's far too extreme.