Sorry, Ghost, but political correctness has nothing to do with tolerance and is, in fact, the exact opposite. Are the politically correct being tolerant when they storm a stage at a university to prevent an invited speaker from speaking?
I was in a meeting and suddenly people were shouting angrily. I looked around to see what was happening and realized they were shouting at me. I'd used a racial slur. I'd said something about "Orientals". None of the people screaming were anything other than lily-white liberals. That is your politically correct tolerance.
I attended a mandatory three-day diversity training session. As it was ending we were asked to all say what we were taking away with us. When it was my turn I held up a piece of paper and said, "My list of who it's okay to hate." I started reading the list and while the other students were grinning the tolerant instructors were screaming.
Of course, Jews headed the list. It was not only okay to hate Jews it was practically mandatory. When I read fundamentalist Christians off my list one of the instructoers screamed, "They want to kill me so you're damned right I hate them."
I've watched you sitting during our breaks chatting with a fundamentalist Christian and he not only wasn't trying to kill you but you seemed to get along fine."
"Who? Who was it?"
"I'm not outing him." Everyone laughed.
No, political correctness is the antithesis of tolerance, courtesy, or polite behavior.
I've witnessed similar behavior to what you're describing. I saw a guy kicked out of a college course for using the word "blacks." The professor got very offended and threw him out. He obviously had a different viewpoint from her, and that was apparent from previous exchanges, but he was actually intellectually curious and not just being difficult. I was a journalism student, and "black" was the preferred term in our writing (AP style). From my point of view, he was just trying to make his point. He wasn't intending a slur or to give offense, but he crossed some invisible and quite arbitrary language barrier, and I noted the irony then. She was offended by his perceived intolerance, but it was actually her who was being intolerant and shutting down open dialogue, and she used her position of authority to punish him for this imagined transgression.
I see that same irony in the OP's story. People of all types can behave like intolerant jerks, sometimes.
She was a smart woman, but I didn't care for her as a professor. I remember she identified herself to the class as a "third-generation Jewish immigrant." She was lily white, but she wanted to cast herself as a minority. I wasn't buying it, and neither was this other guy. The problem was, he wasn't really that smart, and he kept stumbling into her rhetorical traps. In that same course, a guest speaker suggested that white men are inherently intolerant by virtue of just being white men and, thus, not having shared in the minority experience. I wrote a paper pointing out the absurdity of that stance, noting that no one can live in another's skin, and so, by extension of her logic, no one is capable of tolerance or empathy. I expected to get lambasted, but, oddly enough, I got an A.
That was the most traditionally "PC" course I took, and I absolutely hated it. But what I learned from her was that it wasn't her beliefs that made her intolerant. In fact, she was open to having her point-of-view challenged. What triggered her was the challenge to her authority; it was because he wouldn't let her control the conversation.
The problem isn't "political correctness." That, at its core, is really just a plea for empathy. The real problem is when people employ "PC" speech codes as a means of control. It's essentially just shaming, and like all shaming, it's a power play.