Just found out my college paid a speaker $45,000 to cancel their own talk

Saw an old FOIA request on a public records site that showed the university paid that controversial pundit to back out quietly after the backlash got too loud, has anyone else spotted their school doing this with taxpayer money?

2 comments

2 Comments

thompson.robin20d ago

Went through something similar at my old state school back in 2019. They booked this guy who was known for some pretty wild takes on immigration and then after a bunch of student protests the whole thing got cancelled real quiet like. I remember digging through the university's financial disclosure forms months later and found they paid him a $12,000 "consulting fee" right around the same time he announced he couldn't make it due to scheduling conflicts. It was super frustrating because that money came straight from our student activity fees and they tried to hide it with that vague language. What really got me was how they never admitted it publicly even after I brought it up at a student government meeting.

tara70020d ago

Hold up, I gotta push back a little here. You found a $12k consulting fee buried in financial disclosures and it took months of digging? I'm not saying universities are perfect but that kind of paperwork is usually just standard stuff, not some conspiracy. Maybe the guy was paid for actual consulting work related to something else, not just a hush payment. Feels like you're reading way too deep into standard bureaucratic fluff.