The University of Alabama imposed a fee of $7,000 on the College Republicans chapter which sought to host Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016, which effectively restricted the group’s ability to hold the event.
University of California, Berkeley administrators billed the Objectivist Club of Berkeley an estimated security fee of $3,732.33 in 2009, which would have canceled Elan Journo’s lecture, “America’s Stake in the Arab-Israeli Conflict.”
Students for True Academic Freedom at the University of Colorado Boulder planned to bring Ward Churchill and William Ayers to campus in 2009, but the college’s bureaucratic administration threatened to inflict a security fee of more than $2,000 on the club
According to FIRE, the University of New Mexico attempted to charge two students groups $3,400 for “additional security” deemed necessary by the controversial nature of Yiannopoulos in early 2017.
College Republicans at the University of Wisconsin-Madison planned to hold a speech by David Horowitz, a conservative pundit and the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, in 2007. In a slightly different fashion, students were charged a $1,300 speaking fee after the speech went on without incident. The student group could not pay the “afterthought” security fee so the school was forced to cover the fee. However, their unconstitutional attempt to suppress a certain set of ideas did not go unnoticed. According to the UW-Madison College Democrats Chair Oliver Kiefer, “For me to know that my free speech will be protected, everyone else’s free speech should also be protected.”
Students from the College Republicans and the Young Americans for Freedom invited Ben Shapiro to speak at the University of California, Berkeley in Fall 2017, administrators first said they could not provide a venue for him on the already-publicized date. Then, administrators demanded the students pay up to $15,738
