My experience in the U.S. is that public universities aren't much different from private universities (at least the nonprofit ones) on these kinds of policies. They might be better in other respects, such as lower tuition, but they're run by similar kinds of administrators. Often literally the same administrators: there's a lot of churn as people hop between institutions.
The main problem, in my view, is the professionalization of this institution-hopping class of university administrators. It used to be made up of senior faculty who got promoted to Dean, but now it's made up of an entirely separate group of people, often people who come from business management backgrounds, and who have little grounding in a particular institution's traditions or culture. They tend to think rather differently, in a more locked-down, policy-driven way, and apply broad "best practices" without much regard for how things are done in a particular place. Universities end up getting managed like a corporation, with similar kinds of policies.
Things are a bit better at small colleges (Rose-Hulman, Olin, Harvey Mudd, Wesleyan, Pomona, Colgate, etc.), which typically have much lighter-weight administration and a more pro-student, pro-experimentation attitude, as well as more success in en-culturating their administrators so they "get" the local culture and work with it. But they don't scale very well (I say this despite having gone to one and being a big fan of the undergraduate-college model).