> Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.

You have to assume that a protest is representative of something larger.

It's not like there's the normal population and then there's a few hundred people crazy enough to protest for reason X. Much more likely, they have a network of support, people who aren't as convinced as them, but who do agree with them to a large degree and those people have their own network with whom they sort of agree and so on and so forth.

The same applies for any group, no matter how extreme really.

EDIT: Also, I live in Montréal, Canada. I can assure you our universities are infested with "leftist thought", even the engineering ones (and having visited the humanities ones, the infestation can be shockingly intense). There is one wall in UQAM (like, in the school, facing some gathering space) where someone wrote "let's throw the blood from our diva cups in their faces". There absolutely is something going on.