BERKELEY — Milo Yiannopoulos, a polarizing British tech writer from Breitbart News, has made a name for himself by defying “political correctness,” from denouncing Islam to bashing feminism to calling rape culture a “fantasy.”

So what possibly could go wrong with his planned visit next year to UC Berkeley, a paragon of progressive thinking? Campus officials say the Berkeley College Republican club has every right to host an appearance Feb. 1, on one condition: The club must help foot the bill for security — possibly up to $10,000.

“To expect a student club to be able to afford 10 grand? They know it’s extremely prohibitive,” said the group’s president, Jose Marine Diaz.

The group says the fee threatens to do what the flood of letters to the chancellor can’t: cancel the sold-out event that is part of the Breitbart columnist’s sweep through the West early next year. The tour includes stops at UC Davis Jan. 13; UC Berkeley; and UCLA on Feb. 3.

The campus administration insists the charge is standard practice, but the student group’s leader says it is evidence of a campus bias against far-right ideas.

Through a publicist, Yiannopoulos rescheduled an interview with this news organization this week and then failed to respond to written questions before deadline.

Yiannopoulos’s scheduled 2017 appearances at West Coast campuses were sure to be controversial from the start, by design. The very name of his college circuit is a rebuke to a culture of sensitivity and so-called “safe spaces” on many college campuses.

After the June attack on a gay night club in Orlando by a man who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, Yiannopoulos gave a speech at the University of Central Florida called “10 Things I Hate About Islam.” He has gained a cult following by railing against modern feminism and what he calls the “war on men.”

Over the summer, he was banned from Twitter after mocking “Ghostbusters” actor Leslie Jones, who became a target of online racist and sexist harassment.

Then, last week, Yiannopoulos publicly shamed a transgender student activist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“It’s one thing to denounce transgender rights, but to pick a single student and harass them and broadcast it, that’s sexual harassment, and that’s not OK,” said Marandah Field-Elliot, a UC Berkeley student senator. “This is no longer free speech — this is someone who wants to come onto campus and target and harass students.”

Diaz, the head of the Berkeley College Republicans, wouldn’t say whether he was troubled by the incident. He said he didn’t agree with all of the man’s views, but thinks Yiannopoulos brings diversity of opinion to the liberal campus.

“Milo in Berkeley almost sounds antithetical,” Diaz said, but he “is attempting to bring to light many of the problems that have for quite some time now started to plague our universities — freedom of speech, expression.

“If it takes someone as controversial as Milo to come to Berkeley and open up the discourse,” he said, “so be it.”

That is, if the Berkeley College Republicans come up with the cash.

Diaz’s group will be expected to pay for basic security for the public event in the Pauley Ballroom, said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof, and the campus will cover the rest.

“We cannot discriminate and we cannot charge the student group extra money based solely on the content of the speaker’s anticipated expression,” Mogulof said.

Still, he said, the campus has a responsibility to ensure safety. If Yiannopoulos brings private security guards, as he usually does, UC police must send an equal number of officers, said Mogulof — “so we never have a situation where you have an external bodyguard acting on their own.”

And then there is the possibility of conflict. “We’re getting letters that are saying, ‘If the university doesn’t do the right thing, we’re going to take matters into our own hands,'” he said.

But there is little that a public university — an arm of government — can do if it has authorized its student groups to invite speakers to campus, said Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center and dean of the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee State University.

Even a white supremacist, Paulson said, would be “home free” to give a speech under the First Amendment, as long as he didn’t threaten violence.

How UC Berkeley’s progressive student body responds after returning from winter break next month remains to be seen. While some will undoubtedly protest the event, “a big media mess” is what Yiannopoulos wants, said Field-Elliot — which, for some, makes it tempting to just ignore him.

“That’s exactly what he doesn’t want,” she said. “No attention.”