That Wikipedia quotation seems like an overstatement, which I'll talk about below. But there is truth to it. Faculty had extraordinary power in post-revolutionary and antebellum universities in the United States, in comparison administrators have that power in modern universities. Scholars had (and continue to have, I might add!) big egos, on the one hand, and incredibly high expectations for students on the other. This is due in part to the relatively austere Puritan origins of many early American universities, where corporal punishment was practiced. Food tended not to be good on campuses. Conditions were far from luxurious. Demands were rigorous. And the students rebelled where they could. So the issue was less that professors were strict or aggressive or rude with students more than at other points in history; rather, this is a period where American university life is developing unique characteristics. At the risk of being cliche, whenever you gather a group of privileged young men and make extraordinary appeals to their sense of maturity, you likely have the same results.

I can give you a concrete example of this with Jonathan Barber, a rhetoric professor at Harvard in the 1830s. The emphasis at Harvard in this period hard mostly been on the development of vocal delivery through recitation, and Barber devised a way to teach gesture. Here's how David Grover describes the situation:

Barber's answer to this problem was a bamboo cage which he created as a gesture-training device. Th student stood inside the spherical cage and gestured through the appropriate open spaces between the slats according to a system that identified each space with a particular emotion. IT is not clear whether Barber was the first to use this spherical training device, but he must have been one of the first in the nineteenth century to systematize gesture so thoroughly. The use of the sphere seems to have been abandoned, however, when it was found one morning hanging from a barber's pole opposite the college yard.

This "lynching" of elocution, good natured as it was, indicated a growing student rebellion against Barber's methods. Barber required long hours of practice, particularly group practice, in order for the students to achieve the correct intonations required by the elocutionary approach.^1

Just as today, professors ask young people to give up their youth to study, the young people dislike that request, and low-level animosity ensues.

And now for a brief example of how you can begin answering questions like this on your own (please don't burn down my office for suggesting it!). The key here to try to trace the citations for rather extraordinary claims through Wikipedia. In this case we find something rather dubious, which raises some red flags. The citation in Wikipedia is to Mary Ellen Hanson's Go! Fight! Win!: Cheerleading in American Culture (Popular Press, 1995), page 9. There she writes:

In creation to the often severely harsh authority exerted by faculty in the post-Revolutionary War era, college students sometimes rioted, assaulted teachers, and burned campus buildings. As a milder gesture of independence, students developed their own social and recreational activities outside of faculty control.

To support this claim she cites Gregory S. Sojka, "Evolution of the Student-Athlete in America," Journal of Popular Culture 16 (1983): 55. Here is what he writes:

Dull, spartan, well-regulated and academically rigorous, the Post-Revolutionary War students were oppressed by a faculty not much more tolerant of non-academic pursuits than their Puritan predecessors. In return, rebellious energetic students harassed faculty and destroyed buildings in protest over food, curfews and classes.

To support THIS claim, Sojka cites (and perhaps plagiarizes) Guy Lewis, "The Beginning of Organized Collegiate Sport," American Quarterly 22 (1970): 222-9. Here is what HE writes:

The ante-bellum campus was almost devoid of sport. Students had not learned to play with seriousness of purpose and faculty had not discovered that the collegiate experience should consist of more than intellectual development and moral improvement. Student life was dull, Spartan, well-regulated and academically rigorous. [NB: Sojka uses these words without quotation marks in the quotation above, so we know we're in the right territory]. Austere faculty members, usually former clergymen, exercised complete control over every aspect of the lives of their charges. They generally regarded play as a waste of time but permitted it unless the activity became too offensive. But then, students were not very interested in ways to harass faculty, whose position of absolute authority made them the natural enemy. Riot and disorder were frequent, and each school year was marked by cases of personal assault upon members of the faculty, overturning of stoves and breaking of windows and doors. On occasion, dynamite and fire were used to destroy buildings. Most disturbances, often rebellious, grew out of disagreements over regulations, food, and class procedures. Resentment over the emphasis on study gave rise to the first college traditions.

To substantiate THESE claims Lewis cites Andrew P. Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences (Boston, 1888) which you can read here; Henry Sheldon's Student Life and Customs, which you can read here; and Benjamin H. Hall's A Collection of College Words and Customs (Cambridge, 1851), specifically pages 27-32, 45-49, and 55-66. You can read that here.

^1 David H. Grover, "Elocution at Harvard: The Saga of Jonathan Barber" Quarterly Journal of Speech 51 (1965): 62-9