Your point is well received, but there are weak bishops, just like there are weak priests, just like there have been weak popes and even apostles. I happen to think the students acted mostly correctly, and their bishop is not acting correctly.
There are a lot of Catholics who confuse mandatory Doctrinal principles (e.g., soul converting voluntary charity) with merely tolerated non-doctrinal options (e.g., soul chilling forced redistribution of wealth)...even at the bishop level. They forget that Christ called individuals to act to convert souls, not governments to act to improve inequality...and they imbue what they perceive as noble goals with religious mandates...and that leads them to mistakenly vote Democrat. Those Catholics who don't fall prey to that misinterpretation of Tradition are usually Republican, because they know that Christ encouraged freely given charity to convert souls, not forced redistribution of wealth to help the poor (the latter often being counterproductive to convert souls).
Any time the faithful extend mandatory principles (as another example, the spiritually required aspects of Genesis) to optional principles (e.g., optional historical/metaphorical aspects of creation stories), they create problems for the Church. Unfortunately, it happens on both sides of the political spectrum, as my second set of examples shows (creationists usually being Republican).