Mario Savio climbed on a police car in Sproul Plaza in December 1964 and told 3,000 Berkeley students to put their bodies on the gears of the university machine until it stopped. The Free Speech Movement he launched that fall forced Berkeley to guarantee students the right to political activity on campus. Berkeley became the symbol.
Sixty years later, the machine still runs, but I know a rigged system when I see one. I spend my working life pricing risk and testifying in court about what fiduciaries owe people who depend on them. Berkeley has built a mechanism a fiduciary would recognize instantly: It prices speech out of existence without banning it, then hands the bill to everyone except the people who ran it up.
Here’s how it works. A controversial speaker gets invited. Faculty and administrators signal disapproval in advance. Protest groups announce they’ll shut it down. The university piles on security costs so steep the student hosts can’t absorb them, and the event gets canceled, relocated, or buried at an hour nobody attends. The First Amendment is technically observed. The speaker just doesn’t speak.
More than 100 Berkeley faculty urged Chancellor Nicholas Dirks to cancel Milo Yiannopoulos’s February 2017 appearance before a single protester showed up. Dirks refused, citing the First Amendment. That night, roughly 150 black-clad agitators infiltrated a peaceful crowd of 1,500, set fires, threw Molotov cocktails at police, and smashed windows. Police made exactly one arrest, for failure to disperse.
Ann Coulter’s appearance that April was canceled over security concerns and never rescheduled. Ben Shapiro’s September event went off without incident, but security ran roughly $600,000. Berkeley’s total security tab for controversial speakers that year approached $4 million.
Kiara Robles, pepper-sprayed during the riot, sued Berkeley for $23 million. A federal judge dismissed nearly every claim, finding the university immune from civil rights liability as an arm of the state. A private university that lets its security stand down while a guest gets maced would face real exposure. A public one doesn’t. That asymmetry is the whole game.
Conservatives learned this lesson in 2017. Jewish students learned the identical lesson in 2024. That February, three Jewish student groups invited Ran Bar-Yoshafat, an Israeli attorney and reservist, to speak at Zellerbach Playhouse. Roughly 200 protesters broke a glass door and forced their way inside, chanting “intifada.” Students reported being spat on, grabbed by the neck, and shoved. Bar-Yoshafat and the audience evacuated through a tunnel. Campus police classified it as a riot. A year later, nobody had been identified.
The deterrent effect the $4 million security regime of 2017 was supposed to buy showed up in 2024 anyway, aimed at students who did nothing but invite a speaker their classmates found inconvenient.
Washington eventually noticed, though its own machinery moved just as slowly. A Title VI probe into the UC Berkeley School of Law was joined by a Justice Department inquiry into the wider UC system, and by September 2025, Berkeley had turned over 160 names to federal investigators. That same month, a man with no Berkeley affiliation drew nearly 20 years for firebombing a UC police cruiser in solidarity with the protesters. Federal enforcement can move fast. The Alameda County district attorney hasn’t managed that in eight years of Berkeley riots.
In March, Berkeley settled with the Louis D. Brandeis Center, agreeing to weigh the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in campus discipline and pay $1 million in legal fees. Real commitments. Not one dollar reaches the roughly 200 people who broke down the doors at Zellerbach.
I’ve spent 30 years underwriting risk, and I can tell you how an insurer handles a bad loss history: raising the premium on whoever’s generating the losses. A property insurer in a floodplain doesn’t wait for the water before adjusting rates. Berkeley does the opposite, spreading the bill across tuition and state money with no mechanism for assigning cost to the students, faculty, or organizations whose declared intentions created the security need in the first place.
CLOSE ONE LOOPHOLE TO END THE FOREIGN TAKEOVER OF HIGHER EDUCATION
The fixes aren’t complicated. Trustees can enforce conduct standards for administrators who make viewpoint-based calls on speaker security. Legislatures that fund these campuses can condition the money on documented compliance with speech-access rules. Alumni with real giving relationships have leverage most have never used.
The $4 million figure from 2017 and the $1 million figure from 2026 aren’t partisan talking points. They’re the price of an institution that has gotten very good at pricing its own failure and still won’t price the conduct that caused it, whether the victims wore MAGA hats or yarmulkes. Savio thought institutions used their machinery to manage dissent. He was right. He just wouldn’t recognize whose side it’s on now.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.