The College Republicans at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville are suing the public university, alleging that administrators are illegally charging them more to host controversial events.
Student activists are taking their university to court over a policy that requires them to pay additional security fees for events featuring “controversial” guest speakers. Much has been written over the past year about the rise of the “heckler’s veto,” or the notion that protesters can derail events by threatening violence and increasing security costs.
The policy at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville explicitly demands that student groups will be responsible for extra security costs for their events. At the discretion of university officials, additional security fees can be tacked on prior to an event in order to protect against unruly or violent protesters.
[If] university officials determine, in their sole discretion, that additional security is necessary, the student group will be responsible for the costs of additional security as determined by SIUE. The speech zone policy permits university officials to consider the requesting student organization’s content and viewpoint to determine whether its desired event is “controversial in nature” and therefore subject either to security fees or denial.
In an October 2016 column, I mentioned an important 1992 Supreme Court case in which the court decided that public universities would not be permitted to vary security fees for political events based upon an administrator’s subjective determination of “the amount of hostility likely to be created by the speech based on its content.”
It is important to note the distinction between a demand for increased security based upon the content of speech and a demand for increased security based upon the anticipated volatility of an audience’s reaction to said content. With regards to the incident at the University of Maryland, security fees were increased not as a result of the content of Milo’s speech, but out of concerns that their students wouldn’t be able to behave when faced with ideas that conflict with their own.
“Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob,” the court wrote in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992), noting that “[t]hose wishing to express views unpopular with bottle throwers, for example, may have to pay more for their permit.”
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has a “red” rating with regards to freedom of speech practices. The “red” designation is reserved for university’s that have “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.”
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