This is actually pretty cheap for a political speaker who up until a few years ago was in office and fairly relevant.
As someone who acted as the Treasurer for an organization in college, there's no way they were blindsided by his costs. The 14K was likely agreed upon, but the group itself had a few thousand to spend in total.
For those that don't know, every organization is entitled to funding. Whether you get it or not is a whole nother story. This money comes from the student fees that you pay. I know at my alma mater, to get money for speakers you needed to have precedent of bringing names to campus in order to get funds released to pay them. If you don't have a speaker for the year, you will not get money.
Back to the topic, whoever was in charge of booking guests should have been asked to step down. This was a major oversight.