Katherine Kerwin didn’t like to see a portion of the student fees she pays being spent to bring conservative speaker Ben Shapiro to the University of Wisconsin.
Kerwin didn’t agree with Shapiro’s criticism of what he said were attempts to chill free speech at colleges and universities, including the idea of “safe spaces” for people made uncomfortable by hearing controversial points of view.
But she was not among the rowdy protesters who tried to interrupt Shapiro and who demanded that his right-wing campus sponsor, Young Americans for Freedom, be banned and cut off from official funding.
That’s where Kerwin draws the line.
“I’m a Democrat. I don’t want to fund the College Republicans or Young Americans for Freedom,” Kerwin said. “But we’re in college. We should be in a setting where not everybody has the same ideology. We can’t eliminate things because we’re so closed-minded that we don’t want to pay for an organization that we don’t believe in.”
Attempts to allow exactly that have sprung up in Wisconsin and Minnesota, part of a growing movement in which college costs and campus politics converge.
In addition to some activists on both sides of the political divide, Republican elected officials in those states have called for letting students opt out of required fees that go to clubs and causes with which they disagree.
