How is that relevant? Political dissidents like Omali Yeshitela and journalists like Assange have also been persecuted before, but why point it out?
Honestly it sounds like you may be trying to make excuses for these attacks on student protestors by claiming that they’re an inevitable force of nature. That it’s always been this way and always will be. Nothing to see here, move along. Hopefully that’s not what you’re trying to do.
And no, the state is not persecuting students for thinking, it’s persecuting them for the same reason it’s persecuting Yeshitela and Assange: for expressing things it would rather not have expressed.