The conservative speaker fee that flipped my whole view on campus free speech

I went to a town hall at Ohio State last month expecting the usual story about how colleges are silencing right wing voices. But then one of the professors pulled up the actual fee schedules for the student activity fund. Turns out the school charged a 2,500 dollar security deposit for the conservative group's event, but their liberal counterpart paid zero for the same sized venue. That detail shocked me because the whole debate online is always about who gets shouted down, not about the hidden costs that make it impossible to even book a room. I dug into the public records after that and found at least 14 similar cases where student groups with opposing views got billed differently just based on the speaker's reputation. Honestly, I used to think the free speech fight was all about hecklers and invited guests, but the real gatekeeping might be in the accounting office. Has anyone else looked up their own school's fee breakdown for outside speakers, or is this just a quiet problem nobody wants to touch?

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