The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sent a letter Monday to administrators at the University of Pittsburgh alleging that the university violated the First Amendment rights of its College Republicans. (Disclosure: I am president of the Harvard Republican Club, which is not formally affiliated with Pitt’s CRs or any other campuses.) According to the letter, Pitt charged the student organization and its cosponsor, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a security fee of $18,734 for an April 18 debate on transgenderism between Michael Knowles and Brad Polumbo.

Worse, the ADF alleges that the “university’s own communications. . . incited many in the Pitt Community to violence,” forcing the event to end earlier than planned. Prior to the debate, Pitt administrators called it “toxic and hurtful,” and Provost Ann Cudd referred to Knowles as “repugnant.” At least one professor encouraged her students to attend a protest specifically intended to shut the event down. As the event was beginning, rioters were not stopped from “occupy[ing] the street” and shoving and throwing “smoke bombs and other incendiary devices” at attendees.

I’ll leave it to the legal experts to determine whether Pitt’s conduct constituted a First-Amendment violation, but these actions certainly violated Pitt’s own free-speech policies. While the university (rightly) allows students to protest campus events, it prohibits them from “imped[ing] pedestrian and/or vehicular traffic” and from “using or threatening force or violence.” Protestors even managed to violate the rule against “open flame devices” by burning an effigy of Knowles. It would be difficult to design a protest that more completely violates Pitt’s guidelines if you tried, yet, according to the ADF, university police decided to shut down the event rather than “arrest any of the rioters.”

Universities should stop hiding behind free-speech policies that they refuse to enforce. Neither should they wield campus-security policies to undermine free speech by making unpopular events unmanageably expensive. To the greatest extent possible, universities should not expect student organizations to bear the cost of defending their events from mobs — especially when those mobs are primarily composed of other students and are egged on by their professors. Pitt should admit that it failed to do right by its College Republicans and reaffirm its commitment to support its students’ rights “to speak, write, or print freely on any subject, and to sponsor speakers of their choice.”