‘We wanted to level the playing field’ on campus, said attorney Harmeet Dhillon for the Young America’s Foundation
University of California, Berkeley, will no longer be able to charge its student groups any security costs for speakers in a move that conservative groups are cheering, explained a prominent lawyer involved in the case on Tuesday.
Young America’s Foundation (YAF) lawyers took the university to court over its practice.
The conservative youth organization argued that the university was charging student groups security fees to discourage the appearance of conservative speakers on campus.
There have been some recent incidents in which students and far-Left protesters turned violent to silence conservatives.
“We wanted a settlement that doesn’t treat conservatives better than anyone else,” YAF attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon told host Laura Ingraham on “The Laura Ingraham Show” on Tuesday morning.
“We wanted to level the playing field. So now the university’s default rule is, if a speaker comes to speak on campus, either from an outside group that qualifies or an inside group like the Berkeley College Republicans, they are going to charge, in almost every case, zero security fees,” said Dhillon.
Berkeley agreed to the settlement offer on Monday — and the school agreed to pay $70,000.
“The campus police and deans would do some private security assessment. They wouldn’t tell the students what they were going to charge until the last minute. That’s wrong. The university can no longer do that,” said Dhillon. “And this is a huge deal because the University of California is the largest public institution of education in the country.”
