E356. Foreign Influence In Higher Education - Sarah McLaughlin
Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy
Conversations with people from all walks of life.
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | I'm with Sarah McLaughlin, everybody. Welcome to Walkins. Welcome. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:06.2 | Thank you for being here. I'm excited to talk to you about your book today. Tell me, you wrote this book that actually we discussed when Greg Lukinoff came on my podcast recently. And he mentioned what you're writing about. And I'm like'm like oh I have to get her on to talk |
| 0:21.7 | about this because it's such a juicy topic you wrote this book authoritarians in the academy |
| 0:26.6 | and how the internationalization of higher education and borderless censorship threatened free speech |
| 0:34.5 | tell me what inspired you to write this book. Yes. So clearly you know about fire, |
| 0:41.9 | a foundation for individual rights and expression. So I've been there for a long time, |
| 0:45.8 | around 13 years maybe. And for a long time, I was working directly with students and professors |
| 0:51.3 | who came to fire because they needed help because they were dealing |
| 0:54.4 | with some kind of censorship. |
| 0:56.6 | But the longer I worked on this issue, I began to realize that there was kind of like a hidden |
| 1:02.2 | free speech crisis going on in higher education. |
| 1:05.9 | And it's not just about, you know, kind of the traditional flashpoints in U.S. politics that we're familiar |
| 1:11.6 | with like abortion or race or guns, but that there was, you know, kind of a quieter, but still very |
| 1:19.6 | serious censorship crisis happening to people who are critics of foreign governments, primarily |
| 1:24.6 | the Chinese government, and their ability to express themselves |
| 1:29.0 | freely in higher education today because of the way that, A, authoritarian governments like |
| 1:34.9 | to censor speech outside their borders, but B, the way that higher education has become a global |
| 1:40.0 | industry and sort of brought on a lot of new challenges and threats in the way it's |
| 1:45.2 | internationalized. Yeah, that's really fascinating because what you mean is like kids come to |
| 1:51.3 | school, go to schools in the United States from China and feel like they can't really push |
| 1:57.5 | back or speak out against anything in China because when they go home, |
| 2:01.3 | they'll be punished or their families will be punished? Is this what you mean? |
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