Famous author Joyce Carol Oates, who has written over 40 novels and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize five times, thinks that the conservative speakers on campus “force universities to pay exorbitant amounts of money for security to protect them.” Oates tweeted:
Oates’ comment is belied by the fact that the University of California Berkeley paid roughly $600,000 for security for Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, who never said he wanted to bankrupt the university, to speak in September 2017. As The Daily Cal reported, “Police officers from UCPD, Berkeley Police Department and Alameda County Sheriff’s Office provided security for the event, and UCPD also set up a barricade to surround six buildings, including Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, Zellerbach Hall, Cesar E. Chavez Student Center and Eshleman Hall.”
As Kira Davis noted at RedState:
It wasn’t Ben Shapiro who caused the arrest of nine protesters at one of his Berkeley speaking engagements. Shapiro was just talking…with words…using his mouth. Hardly inciting. It was the immature and soft-thinking college crowd who could not tolerate the presence of a political personality who did not parrot their own underdeveloped rationale, and so turned to violence rather than just letting him talk and just leave.
When “The Bell Curve” author Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury College in Vermont the student body became so violent that they attacked him and his campus escort on the way out of the venue, sending their own professor – Allison Stanger – to the hospital.
But of course, Oates is not quite non-partisan:
For goodness sake, the writer even treats the president’s last name as a curse word to be blocked out: