Weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus in Utah, the student group he co-founded claims the University of Maryland, College Park violated its free-speech rights with a $148.52 security fee.

The state’s flagship university asked its Turning Point USA chapter to spend the money on an outside security company to monitor a Wednesday evening event featuring Cabot Phillips, senior editor at The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet. The event, called “Fighting like Charlie,” was the first time the campus group has hosted an outside speaker since Kirk’s death.

Such fees aren’t unusual — campuses like Frostburg State and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County require student groups to pay for event security when they deem it necessary. But the Maryland Turning Point chapter and free-speech advocates accused UMD administrators of charging them more because of their viewpoints.

The university wrote to student leaders earlier this month informing them they were required to pay for the Contemporary Services Corporation, a contractor often used by UMD for security.

The university “imposes the same related security fees on other event hosts holding similar types of guest speaker events, regardless of the content or viewpoint,” Rebecca Aloisi, senior director of communications, said in a statement. Most of the security was paid for by the university. The only thing the students had to cover was the security members who checked attendees’ bags, Aloisi noted.

At Wednesday’s event, held in a classroom, about eight security officers and university employees were present. Two officers searched attendees’ bags and scanned their bodies with a metal detector. Despite registering ahead of time, a Baltimore Banner reporter was asked to leave the talk shortly before it began to make room for walk-in attendees.

Turning Point USA’s College Park chapter did not respond to multiple interview requests.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also known as FIRE, sent a letter to UMD President Darryll Pines last Friday that accused the university of violating the campus group’s First Amendment rights.

The nonpartisan organization pointed to the 1992 Supreme Court decision Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement, in which the court determined that government actors, including public college or university administrators, cannot lawfully impose security fees based on their own subjective judgements about “the amount of hostility likely to be created by the speech based on its content.”

In the letter sent to Pines, Charlotte Arneson, program counsel for FIRE’s campus rights advocacy division, argued that the university was not permitted to “force student groups to pay more money for security protection because others in the community might feel offended by an event and subsequently become violent or disruptive.”

Arneson added that the university “provided a dangerous blueprint” for those hoping to suppress the viewpoints of campus groups.

“With the precedent UMD has set here, any student or community member could announce plans to disrupt a group’s campus event, and encourage others to do so, in the hope that UMD would respond by financially burdening the group to the point that it can no longer afford to exercise its right to free speech,” she wrote.

FIRE, as well the College Park chapter of Turning Point USA, are arguing that the fee was targeted. They claim the campus’s Students Supporting Israel chapter, for example, was not charged for security personnel, high-level weapons detection, bag searches and a drone at an Oct. 7 vigil the pro-Israel group hosted. All of those services, the letter states, were provided by the Contemporary Services Corporation, the same contractor that the university said the Turning Point chapter had to pay.

The chapter announced Tuesday that The Leadership Institute, an organization that trains conservative activists, offered to pay the security fee.

Despite the attention around Kirk’s death, officials from several Maryland colleges said their event security measures remained the same. But there are signs administrators are acutely aware of the risks. Last week Towson University student activists moved a planned “No Kings” rally off campus after an official told them speakers’ names would be run through federal government databases and vetted for security reasons.

“Security-related issues are now being taken very seriously at all institutions of higher education,” said Konrad Motyka, treasurer of the Northeast College and University Security Association. But universities should remain “agnostic and apolitical” about campus speakers, he said.

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