10. DePaul University
So, maybe the last one is the WORST one. Listen to what happened at DePaul last year:
In April, after students chalked messages in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, DePaul warned all students that they were not allowed to chalk partisan messages on campus due to the university’s tax-exempt status—a justification that FIRE has refuted on several occasions.
A month later, when the College Republicans invited controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos to campus, DePaul attempted to obstruct the event by limiting Yiannopoulos’ speaking time to 15–20 minutes and charging the students $1,000 for extra security. When students stormed the stage and disrupted the event, the security guards refused to intervene. When the College Republicans sought to re-invite Yiannopoulos, DePaul banned them from doing so.
But DePaul was not done infringing on its students’ rights. In July, DePaul also banned the DePaul Young Americans for Freedom chapter from inviting conservative journalist Ben Shapiro to speak on campus.
FIRE wrote to DePaul about all of these incidents, urging it to adhere to its promises of free expression for students. Unfortunately, DePaul’s response did little besides deflect and blithely repeat its illusory commitment to working with students to invite speakers from across the ideological spectrum.
One might suspect that DePaul would think twice about resorting to the same censorship tactics again. However, only eight days after FIRE’s first letter, the university required the DePaul Socialists student organization pay hundreds of dollars for security for an informational meeting about the group, because the event could be “potentially controversial.”