I doubt Ms. Tsing’s anthropology lecture would have cost Berkeley and the University of California system anywhere near $1 million. And I suspect that if Ms. Tsing were sharing the campus with a conservative like Yuval Levin or Walter Williams on the same day, neither speech would have to be canceled. Which is why spending seven figures’ worth of student fees and taxpayer money to host Mr. Yiannopoulos is less about defending free speech than it is about supporting provocation for its own sake.

Undoubtedly, left-wing “antifa” groups have contributed to the security risks and costs at Berkeley, taking the bait that speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos lay out and battling far-right militia groups who show up looking for a fight. But we should keep in mind, as the historian Mark Bray points out, that antifa groups form specifically to counter white supremacist and Nazi violence, having done so from the days of Hitler and Mussolini. Antifa groups are a symptom, not a cause, of the threat of white supremacist violence.

For the most part, both sides have little to do with college students who are, by and large, angry to see their campus overrun by outsiders.

Universities have a duty to keep campuses safe, not in the service of paternalism, but in the service of providing a suitable learning environment for students. It’s easy to claim that denying a speaker — even one like Mr. Yiannopoulos or Richard Spencer — is a kind of epistemological harm that makes students worse off. But so too are the acts of shutting down popular facilities for security purposes, and bringing in less-experienced security personnel who needlessly escalate violence with students, and transforming the campus into a microcosm of a police state.

The question of which campus speakers warrant security funding is real and challenging — especially considering that a speech by Ben Shapiro, a mainstream conservative who used to speak at Berkeley with barely a mention, recently cost the school $600,000 in security expenses.

But the escalation of security costs isn’t a response to conservative thought. It is the only way schools can respond to a deliberate right-wing strategy, driven by outside groups, to inflict disruptive and deliberately offensive speakers on campuses, and thus bait the left into outrage. The audience for right-wing speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos is not college students themselves, but rather the culture warriors on either side of the aisle who respond to seeing campus communities in distress.