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Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: All right, folks. Welcome back to So To Speak, the free speech podcast where every other week, we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. I am, as always, your host, Nico Perrino. Today, we are having another book conversation, and I am overjoyed to be joined by FIREsenior scholar for global expression, Sarah McLaughlin. She just published this book, Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, available wherever fine books are sold. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah McLaughlin: Thanks for having me, Nico.

Nico Perrino: I have to ask, and I don’t think I’ve asked you this off-air.

Sarah McLaughlin: Okay.

Nico Perrino: How is it writing a book? I mean, was it as grueling for you as it is for me at the moment?

Sarah McLaughlin: I found ultimately that having to go back and start editing the things you wrote was actually a more painful process –

Nico Perrino: I’m not even at that process –

Sarah McLaughlin: – than the actual writing.

Nico Perrino: – yet, so don’t...

Sarah McLaughlin: Get ready. Pain comes soon. No, I enjoyed it. I’ve been steeped in these issues for so long that it was not as difficult as I expected the writing to be, but as I mentioned, having to edit what I wrote through a first pass was more difficult.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, so you mentioned you’ve been steeped in these issues. How did you first come to confront the issue of globalized censorship?

Sarah McLaughlin: Well, so I’ve been at FIREfor a long time. I think this week, actually, might be 13 years.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, you and I are kind of on the same timeline.

Sarah McLaughlin: Oh, yeah.

Nico Perrino: You started as a Drexel co-op, right?

Sarah McLaughlin: I did, yeah, in 2012.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, that’s when I started full-time.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, so a lot’s happened. So, when I started after I graduated, I came on to our campus rights program, so I was doing ��֭����’s bread and butter cases of working with students and professors who were fired for a tweet, for a protest, for teaching a book someone didn’t like, holding a sign, you know, the basic kind of cases that we see. There are a number of topics that we’re very accustomed to seeing at the root of ��֭����’s cases; abortion, race, gender, the standard things that create controversy, and they are political.

Nico Perrino: Culture stuff.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Often.

Sarah McLaughlin: Those things are very common. But what I was noticing over time, the longer I was doing this work, was that there were actually some other political issues that I was noticing were creating a censorship issue on campus, and that weren’t traditional American flashpoints. They were guns or abortion. It was actually the foreign government’s political issues, specifically the Chinese government’s issues, and how it was affecting what professors could teach and what students could say, sometimes in really meaningful, deep ways.

Nico Perrino: How would China dictate what could or couldn’t be said on an American college campus? It just doesn’t make sense.

Sarah McLaughlin: It doesn’t compute, right?

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Sarah McLaughlin: Well, there’s actually a lot of different ways. One of the ways that I talk about a lot in the book is the direct threats to students from China. So, international students who come here and who think, “You know what? Oh, man, this is the first time in my life I’m gonna speak my mind. I’m gonna read this book. I’m gonna hold this sign in the quad.” And they find that they’ve left China, they’ve left home, but the Chinese government hasn’t really left them. So, they get here, and it turns out, they’re still being surveilled, they’re still being watched, and not only are they at risk perhaps for legal recourse when they return home, for prison, but also their families are at risk. Their families are used.

They’re used against them to try to punish them, like something bad might happen to your mom if you don’t shut up.

Nico Perrino: Does that actually happen?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Have you seen reports of that?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yes. So, I’ve spoken directly with students who have been contacted by their families, who say, “Police just visited. They showed us what you were tweeting. They said if you don’t stop, there’s going to be trouble.” Sometimes they receive multiple visits from party members, from police, from security officials, and the threat is very clear. If you don’t do something, your family is gonna suffer, or if you do something, your family is gonna suffer. And, you know, I think for a lot of people, there’s this idea that I’m willing to put myself out there, to put myself at risk, but am I really willing to put people who have no choice in this matter at risk too?

And that’s why it’s such an effective strategy, because it uses the people you love against you, and it’s tragic.

Nico Perrino: So, set the scene here. I believe you have some statistics in the book that talk about the percentage of international students in America. I think I was looking amidst all this Harvard controversy, something like 27% of their student body is international, and a large portion of that is Chinese as well. Is that right?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, so it really varies by campus. In the grand scheme of things, international students are a fairly small percentage. I’m not sure exactly what the numbers are. There are a lot of reasons why that’s fluctuating right now. In the past few years, COVID created a lot of difficulties for international travel, but also, there have been a lot of threats from the Trump administration that they’re gonna limit international student access to the country. So, whether students will be fully allowed here, whether they will lose interest, is sort of up for debate.

But to give a very long answer to that question, at their peak, there were probably 300,000 international students from China here in the US, but there’s millions of international students from China that travel all around the world and are part of higher education systems globally.

Nico Perrino: And China is a main character in your book because it is such a populist country, and also, though, right, its system of repression or censorship in America is more robust and systematic than some of these others. So, with these threats lingering, how are they actually effectuated on campus? Are there American university administrators who are playing ball with the Chinese government?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yes, and so there’s a couple of different issues in play here. One is the extent to which government officials have made clear and direct demands on universities to censor.

Nico Perrino: Chinese government officials.

Sarah McLaughlin: Chinese government officials. We do need to clarify that these days.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Sarah McLaughlin: So, there is the question of that, and that can come in the form of Chinese consulates who send a letter to the university saying, “Boy, I saw that you invited the Dalai Lama speaker. Are you sure you wanted to have done that? That doesn’t seem wise.”

Nico Perrino: The Dalai Lama and the Chinese communist party, they don’t get along?

Sarah McLaughlin: Historically, no. And, you know, that’s been continuing. What’s sort of fascinating is how long the Chinese government will keep up these censorship campaigns against their targets. I mean, obviously, the issues with Tibet are ongoing, but they are just as energetic about censoring speech about Tiananmen, for example, even though that’s decades past, they still will not allow people to talk about it or learn what happened. So, they are really quite committed to keeping up the censorship around issues the Chinese government considers sensitive. But, yeah, there’s a Chinese government demanding, through its consulates, that universities act. In some cases, Confucius Institutes have been used, which are ultimately connected to the Chinese government. I can give a longer explanation of Confucius Institutes.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, why don’t you unpack what Confucius Institutes are? They used to be more prevalent on college campuses than they are now. There’s been some kind of pressure from government officials here in the United States to unwind those, and that’s happened a bit, but for a while there, they were a pretty significant vehicle for some of the censorship.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, they are almost gone, but I wanna preface that by saying just because Confucius Institutes have gone, doesn’t mean that the underlying relationships between American universities and Chinese universities have disappeared. Not at all. But Confucius Institutes are essentially programs managed by the Chinese government, and they coordinate ties between an American university or a different foreign university and the Chinese university. They provide some funding, usually $200,000.00 maybe, some teaching materials, teaching staff, things like that.

So, they come here, and the nice way to explain it is that they are intended to be institutes that offer education, cultural programming, language education, things like that. They do that, but they have also done things like tell universities that if they don’t disinvite a speaker that the Chinese government doesn’t like, then they’ll cancel the partnership, and there will be some response or retaliation on the part of the Chinese government. That happens sporadically. I don’t think that every Confucius Institute was doing this, but enough were doing it that it’s clear that the relationship alone did create the risk of academic freedom violations for sure.

Nico Perrino: I wanna talk about one example that really struck me, which was the February 2022 campaign to put up some anonymous posters around George Washington University’s campus. They were extensively Olympic-themed protest posters, but when you got close to them, they highlighted Chinese human rights abuses. Initially, the George Washington University administration did not cover itself in glory from a free-speech perspective in responding. So, if you can use this case, first tell us a little bit more about it, but also kind of use it to unpack some of the themes from your book and some of the challenges that American universities have to face, given partnerships, and frankly, just like cultural sensitivity concerns with the international student body.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, so what’s interesting about the George Washington case is that some of what I talk about in the book is the Chinese government directly or indirectly encouraging or demanding censorship on the part of universities. Another part of that story is how a lot of this dispute has been picked up by students and how students are sometimes the main driver of demands for censorship of [inaudible – crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Are these American students?

Sarah McLaughlin: It’s a mix, but the primary leader in this has been chapters of the Chinese FIREand Scholars Association. The student groups are allowed to form around shared backgrounds, culture, and values, and FIREhas long defended students' rights to do this.

Nico Perrino: And they even call for censorship.

Sarah McLaughlin: And even call for censorship. You have a right to do that even if we think it’s a liberal or a bad idea. But there has been a lot of clear involvement on the part of CSSA Chapters to appeal to university administrators to try to dictate university programming to their preferences and sensitivities. That’s what we saw at GW. So, what happened there was after those posters went up and they were anonymously put up in the building, at the time, we didn’t know who, which becomes an important part of the question, but the CSSA and another student group, I believe it’s the Chinese Cultural Association, complained to GW’s administration, and they said, “These posters are hurtful, offensive. The university needs to act.”

Nico Perrino: What did they depict again?

Sarah McLaughlin: So, they depicted a series of human rights issues in China. And sort of like nameless representatives of China’s Olympic team, maybe participating in them, you know, just meant to be a representative of the Chinese government; so, abuse of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and there was also one that people especially complained about, which alluded to the Chinese government’s cover-up of COVID after the COVID pandemic started. So, students went to GGW’s administration, and they said, “You have to do something,” and they got their wish. GW’s president at the time responded, and he said that he was “personally offended by those posters,” which was a very interesting thing.

Nico Perrino: Personally offended by what exactly?

Sarah McLaughlin: That’s a good question.

Nico Perrino: Okay. I almost asked it seriously. Is he saying these human rights abuses don’t exist, or were they depicted in a way that he thought was racist?

Sarah McLaughlin: So that’s the thing. I think universities want to be seen as being proactive against hate, offense, and bias on campus. And it can lead them into saying things that, if you step back for a moment –

Nico Perrino: Look, patently absurd.

Sarah McLaughlin: – looks really ridiculous.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Sarah McLaughlin: What personally offended you about those posters describing China’s human rights issues? So, he said he was personally offended. Then he said he was ordering the posters to be taken down, but he didn’t stop there. He also said he was going to have the university conduct an investigation to see who had posted them. So, we now have an American university in the heart of the country, Washington D.C., saying, “We’re going to have our campus security unmask critics of the Chinese government.” Anyone involved in this should’ve had an alarm going off in their head, like, “What are we doing here?”

Unfortunately, that alarm did not go off in their heads until people like ��֭����, legislators said, “Wait, hold on, you’re doing what?” So, fortunately, President Wrighton said, “You know what, I made a mistake.” And that’s good. We don’t want to put people in a position where they feel like they have to take it even further and can’t admit they made a mistake.

Nico Perrino: We should be able to accept people’s apologies.

Sarah McLaughlin: But, you know, I do want to investigate a little bit why that was his first response, why he didn’t think to say, “GW has free speech commitments. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m personally offended by the posters because campus speech policies are not dictated on the whims of subjective ideas of offense,” but that’s not what he did. At the time when I was first writing about this, when it was still open to investigation on the university’s part, I pointed out that there is a good chance here that the people who posted these images were international students from China and Hong Kong.

And if you open an investigation and create a disciplinary record for them, you are creating a very real risk that when they return home, they’re going to go to prison for this because this is not something that’s gonna just be left behind. It will follow them. I do wanna say it’s good that the university realized it made a mistake, but I also do want them to realize the scope of what they had almost done to these students.

Nico Perrino: I don’t think many Americans realize just how repressive and censorial some of these foreign countries can be. So, they think someone posts something that may be insensitive, we’re gonna punish them, and they’re like, “Well, that’s it,” but it’s really not.

Sarah McLaughlin: And I think sometimes people look at free speech issues on campus and they say, “Oh, whatever. So, a student gets a black mark on their disciplinary record. They’ll get over it.” I mean, that’s really not the case for the students in question here. I don’t agree that we should look so lightly at what’s happened to American students either, but it’s also a very real risk that having that record would send someone to jail in very severe conditions, perhaps for a long time. And for universities to welcome international students to be very happy to take their oftentimes higher than their American peers’ tuition dollars, and then be so reckless and careless about their rights. That’s something that I find really frustrating.

Nico Perrino: Well, who were the students who posted it?

Sarah McLaughlin: Ultimately, some of them were international students from China and Hong Kong. I interviewed them. I was able to get in touch with them in the aftermath. They were really aggrieved, understandably, by what happened because they felt that their university was not only disregarding their rights, but was also wading into things that they didn’t understand in ways that were very, almost seemed to support the Chinese government’s position on things without thinking it through because they just took, like the CSSA’s complaints, for example, as representative of what Chinese students on campus felt about these posters. They didn’t like that the university was weighing in to suggest, “Yes, those posters were offensive.”

One of the things that was most interesting to me was one of the students I spoke to, he told me that his father had actually been at Tiananmen, had been a protestor, a student protestor there, and he didn’t tell his dad about what he was doing at GW because he didn’t wanna put his dad at risk of retaliation like some other family members of international students have been. I felt that was really tragic, one of the small and maybe not seen or paid attention to, tragic examples of what censorship does to families, where it would probably be really meaningful for him to be able to discuss that with his dad, but he didn’t wanna put him in danger.

Nico Perrino: We’ve mentioned COVID a couple of times here. How did the COVID years change these considerations for international students on campus? Classes are being held online, often via Zoom, there’s more of a digital footprint as to what these students do or say in their class than there was prior to that if you’re taking an international politics or history course and you’re looking at China or any of these other countries, and what you say can get back to the Chinese government presumably that would chill some of what these students say. Has that been something that professors and the administrators have considered, have tried to address in one way or another?

Sarah McLaughlin: It’s something I definitely saw a response to from professors who teach issues that are particularly sensitive to the Chinese government. I did not see much of a response from the university administrations, and I think there are probably a few reasons why, one of them being that if you acknowledge that the Chinese government creates risks to your students, it gets a little bit harder to justify having perhaps a satellite campus in that exact country. But getting back to your question here, what was happening during COVID was, as I mentioned, students have already been fearful that some kind of digital trail is gonna follow them and create legal risks for them.

But when you’re doing everything online, that concern is magnified significantly, and you can’t really control it. You cannot have a digital trail because that was, you know, for a year, year and a half, basically, everything we did was, especially expressive-wise, was kind of on the internet. So, they were fearful of that, and then a lot of these students weren’t even on campus. Some of them were trapped in other countries at home because of travel restrictions, so you might be in the position where you’re taking a class via Zoom, which is gonna be heavily surveilled, in China, perhaps, and you’re reading and teaching material that is not legal in your country. So, yeah, that created a lot of risks.

I think, for the most part, professors responded really thoughtfully and well to it, kind of the dual position of we’re not gonna trade away our rights. We’re not going to accept limits on what we teach, but we’re also going to be conscientious of the rapidly evolving situation our students are in, and at least think of ways to provide anonymity or to contribute to class in a non-group discussion over Zoom, so you don’t have to fear that your peers will be filming you and what you say. So, I think they did a good job with that. But one thing that I also talk about in the book that was happening, the worst timing that you can have, was that Hong Kong passed a national security law in 2020, just after everything went online.

The laws were explicitly written to apply to anyone and everyone around the world at any time. So, right now, you and I could be violating Hong Kong’s national security law even though we’re not citizens and aren’t there. With everything being done online, there was a lot of heightened fear, not just among students, but also among professors that they were maybe gonna be violating this law by talking about Hong Kong, and that, should they travel back to Hong Kong or China, they might face some legal repercussions, or they might not even be allowed to travel back there.

Nico Perrino: You talk about sensitivity exploitation in your book. You talk about a 2019 incident involving then-Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who tweeted an image speaking of Hong Kong that said, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” There was some backlash to this from figures including –

Sarah McLaughlin: Mild.

Nico Perrino: – yeah, including LeBron James, who responded by saying that he could harm people, not only financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually. You had the Chinese Consulate in Houston, which stated, “We have lodged representations and expressed strong dissatisfaction with the Houston Rockets and urged the latter to correct the error and take immediate concrete measures to eliminate the adverse impact.”

I’m also thinking of some cases that we worked on at ��֭����, where you had students or student groups, one case involving Emerson College, where, during COVID, they handed out stickers with the Gen Z slang, “China kinda sus,” a reference to COVID and the Chinese government and the Wuhan lab theory, which now some American intelligence agencies think is likely, but in that case, you had the president of the university punish the student group for handing out these stickers and saying that they were representing anti-Asian hate and bias.

I think we also had a case involving a professor who wrote on his blog about the lab-like theory that anyone who didn’t agree with it was swallowing a bunch of Chinese…and he was accused of being racist. So, you have these allegations of racism, or to use LeBron James’ language, harming people emotionally and spiritually as a way to kinda pressure them to shut up. And I think about this as an American, yeah, I live in America, and we live in a representative democracy, so the government speaks to me in some ways, but I wouldn’t think it would be racist to criticize the Chinese government.

There seems to be almost a kind of conflation almost purposely being made in order to shut people up from criticizing the Chinese government, a conflation between the Chinese people and their government.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, and I think it’s taking advantage of this desire to be seen as responsive to hate, hurt, and offense. It’s really bad faith, you know, a subversion of that notion to say, “Okay, if you’re going to try to fight back and not allow hate on this campus, well, I find this Uyghur speaker to be very hateful. And there’s actually a case at McMaster University in Canada where CSSA there said that it was violating the university’s hate speech policy for students to invite a Uyghur speaker to talk about her experience being victimized by the Chinese government.

So, it’s using these notions of hate, and hurt, and harm to say, “Okay, well, that’s what I feel when you say these things about the Chinese government, and it’s really offensive to me as a student. I’m a paying student, and I deserve to have an environment where I don’t experience that here.” So, it’s using that notion of insensitivity to say, “Okay, well, I find these speakers, Tibetans and Uyghurs, insensitive to me.”

Nico Perrino: We talked a lot about China during this conversation, and with good reason. Again, they have a large population of students who come here to study. They’re also one of the world's powers, of course. And we’ve also talked about American college campuses here in the United States, but there are also situations where American colleges set up satellites in some of these foreign countries, and that has created free speech and academic freedom problems when you try to import or export American freedom to countries that don’t have the same standards, to put it mildly, for freedom. Can you talk about maybe the satellite campuses in Qatar? I know we have Georgetown University. Was it Northwestern one also?

Sarah McLaughlin: Northwestern as well, yeah.

Nico Perrino: Northwestern. The Qatar examples, I think, really bring some of these challenges to light.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, so what’s really interesting about these campuses is, I think universities have been, to be honest, perhaps straight out lying about what they can actually provide. So, they have been very clear, sometimes in front of Congress, saying, “We are providing an American-style education. We are bringing our values and our policies, and we are creating little pockets of freedom abroad. We’re gonna stand by our values there.” The evidence is clear; they have very obviously not stood by those values when challenged. The Qatari campuses are a perfect example because universities have been put in this position where they’ve been forced to admit, “Okay, we have our values as long as they're in accordance with Qatari law.”

Nico Perrino: Yeah, at Georgetown University in 2018, they wanted to host a debate on the Qatari campus with a motion that said, “This house believes that major religion should portray God as a woman.” What happened next?

Sarah McLaughlin: That event did not go on. What was interesting is Georgetown GU-Q used an excuse that we’ve seen a lot here in the US, kind of amorphous security concerns, or they didn’t have the proper permits, things we’ve seen here a lot that very conveniently happen to pop up when there’s a controversial [inaudible – crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Censorship –

Sarah McLaughlin: – play.

Nico Perrino: – by a technicality.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah. And so, I read about it and I said, “Georgetown, are you sure that there was a permitting or policy issue and it wasn’t just because Qatar has a blasphemy law where you can be imprisoned for expressing religious views that go against the prevailing government's theocratic –

Nico Perrino: Orthodoxy or doctrine?

Sarah McLaughlin: – to the state?

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Sarah McLaughlin: And Georgetown then admitted that Georgetown has free expression in Qatar as long as it’s in accordance with Qatari law. And that, to me, is a pretty big asterisk. Blasphemy law is quite a cut out from a free speech policy.

Nico Perrino: It’s like the original censorship, right?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah. It’s about as basic as it gets, saying you can’t say what the state doesn’t like about God. So, that’s a perfect example of what’s happening. Something similar happened at Northwestern’s Qatar campus, where they had invited a speaker who is gay, and he was going to speak, and they said, “Oh, we had to cancel this for security concerns. We’ll host it at our home campus in the US instead.” You know, if you look no further, you think, “Oh, well, that’s nice. They’re still making sure that the event goes forward, and they’re not gonna let security threats take it down.” But that’s not what happened.

They were immediately undermined by the Qatar Foundation, which is a state-linked body and which is the partner for all of these American campuses that open up there. It coordinates, and it’s their partner there. And they said, “No, that isn’t what happened. This event was canceled because” I think their words were, 'it patently did not correlate with Qatari law and social custom.” And so, Northwestern was kind of thrown under the bus because they were trying to give an excuse that didn’t suggest they were allowing Qatari law to dictate what happens on the campus, and then their state partner said, “Yeah, that’s what happened. Yes, we did that.”

Nico Perrino: But in a certain sense, you want these sorts of cultural exchanges, right? You wanna have these programs overseas. Is the problem that you have these programs overseas, and these universities are essentially lying?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yes. So, I think that at the base of this, it’s a lack of transparency and honesty about what a university can actually provide because they wanna be very clear. They wanna give you these flowery statements about their values, but they also want to accept the very large financial opportunities that come with moving abroad to the Gulf States, for example. So, yes, ultimately, I think transparency is the issue, but I also think it’s worth asking if the university should be opening up campuses in countries where they’re not even willing to say, quite clearly, what the law is on the ground. That, to me, is a pretty obvious problem.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. You suggested there was some new development with Northwestern?

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, so, recently, they just released a congressional interview of the outgoing president of Northwestern. They explicitly asked him if the Qatar campus has free speech, and he said, “Yes. We have our policies and principles apply there.” And they said, “Okay, what about the Qatari censorship law?” And then he immediately said, “Oh, well, I don’t know. I’m not a legal expert.” So, they’re very clear when you’re talking at 30,000 feet, “Yes, our values, our principles.” And they, when you say, “Okay, well, what about the blasphemy law?” “Well, you know, that’s very complicated.”

Nico Perrino: So, in this current moment, it’s interesting to talk about these subjects. You had mentioned that the satellite campuses are pockets of freedom, often in countries that are more oppressive, again to say the least, than America has been historically. But right now, America itself is not really a pocket of freedom for these international students. You have Rumeysa Ozturk, right, a Turkish student who comes here, writes an op-ed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and her university’s investments, and she gets snatched off the street by ICE agents in plain clothes. You have Mahmoud Khalil, who took part or negotiated on behalf of these protestors at Columbia University, similarly detained by ICE.

The universities are put in a tough position, and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has made it more or less really clear that he has broad-based authority to target people even for ideologically-based reasons.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, they’ve used the term anti-American ideology, which I bet you and I have a different idea of what anti-American is. I’m sure Marco Rubio and I have a different idea of what anti-American means. It’s very broad and it’s unlimited.

Nico Perrino: Well, right now, primarily, it seems to be criticism of Israel is also anti-American, and we’re representing the Stanford Daily publishing part, the student newspaper for Stanford, along with some other plaintiffs in a challenge to some of these provisions that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, is using to pursue ideologically-based deportations. But one of the reasons we represented Stanford Daily is because they have international students who used to write and edit for the paper, who are now afraid to do so because some of the stories that they write or edit might be viewed by the administration as being anti-American or some other sort of crosswise direction with the administration.

So, now you have international students who are not self-censoring because of what their home country might be seeing them do, but they’re self-censoring because of fear of the American government coming in and torpedoing their American education, which presumably they were very excited to get when they arrived here. Is there anything else to say on that, I guess?

Sarah McLaughlin: Well, what’s happened in the past just six months or so has been really tragic from my point of view because part of the reason why I wrote this book is because I do actually believe there’s some credible value in offering the American-style freedoms and education to international students. I think there is something so beautiful, and it’s maybe one of the best things about America, the idea that someone can come here and take a deep breath and say, “Wow, for the first time I can say what I think.” I love the idea.

Nico Perrino: Breathe the air of freedom, yes.

Sarah McLaughlin: But you know, coming here could be life-changing for someone, the first time that they get to explore not just different political views but also get to better understand themselves just through being able to encounter and interact with different ideas. So, the idea that we are just willing to torch that, I think, is tragic for these students, for the rest of the world, but also for us, because I think we lose things too when we silence students who I think we have a lot to learn from as well. What’s also making it difficult is that it’s getting a lot harder to find ways to protect these students.

I mean, what FIREis doing with this lawsuit is incredibly important because it’s getting hard for me to help these students better understand how to protect themselves when they feel like the threats are coming from every side. There was a point at which they might have actually looked to the federal government as a –

Nico Perrino: A bulwark.

Sarah McLaughlin: – yeah, as a bulwark and perhaps a way to combat the transnational repression they’re facing here in the United States but I can’t imagine that a lot of students will feel safe doing that because they’ll worry, “Oh, boy, what if they don’t like my position on Ukraine or Israel and they won’t just not help me, but they might actually actively target me too.”

Nico Perrino: Yeah, or even if this administration doesn’t, there’ll be a future administration that might have a different perspective on some of these issues.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, I mean, we know very well here at FIREthat these are Pandora’s boxes. When you open it, crazy things can happen.

Nico Perrino: Was there anything you learned writing this book that you were surprised by? Some of the conversations, it seemed like you had with the international students, made it just kind of inspiring by their bravery.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, well, I think one thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as we have been dealing with a lot of issues, that I think you could perhaps put under the umbrella of cowardice here in the US is when it comes to people who could make stands for their rights and are choosing not to for self-serving reasons because it’s financially the smart thing to do –

Nico Perrino: ABC.

Sarah McLaughlin: – or it’s too much work, or the political questions at play. These are people who are, for the most part, not even willing to risk a little bit of money or power. The students I was speaking to have really put everything on the line. So, the idea that we have people coming here and are willing to do everything just to be able to hold a sign saying what they think, and we have some of the richest people, most powerful people in the country, who aren’t even willing to risk a little bit of time and money to stand up for themselves. I think it should be a little a shameful lesson for some.

Nico Perrino: We have a recurring segment here. I don't know if you saw this in the outline. Do you have a free speech literature recommendation besides your book, obviously?

Sarah McLaughlin: You know, actually, I just finished reading, I think it was called John Brown, Abolitionist by David Reynolds, and obviously, I knew that there was a lot of censorship. The book was largely about John Brown, of course, but it also talked about the abolitionist movement in the US more broadly in the 19th century, and I was consistently taken aback by how severe the censorship was of basic political expression advocating abolition. I was really floored at times.

Nico Perrino: I saw, I read, there was a line in Jacob Mchangama’s History of Free Speech book that floored me, where he said, I think it was a Georgia law that made it punishable by potentially death to distribute abolitionist literature in that state.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, and it was in states all across the country, new territories, and it wasn’t just, obviously, there were laws which are the most concerning part, but also mob violence, people who would break in to abolitionist’s presses and throw all of their printing material into the river and the extent to which legal and social censorship.

Nico Perrino: Was that Elijah Lovejoy? He was one of them. I know Ida B. Wells ran some of that.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah.

Nico Perrino: Yeah.

Sarah McLaughlin: But the extent to which that was taking place, I knew it happened, but reading about it all at once together –

Nico Perrino: I have to check that out.

Sarah McLaughlin: – really, really disturbed me.

Nico Perrino: What about hero or inspiration?

Sarah McLaughlin: Well, I have been obviously reading a lot of Frederick Douglass lately.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, well –

Sarah McLaughlin: Which is –

Nico Perrino: – when you said the mobs coming in and breaking up meetings and presses, I thought of his plea for free speech in Boston, in 1860, after a pro-slavery mob broke up his abolitionist meeting.

Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, and I was reading recently about how he was going to give one speech; it might have been about the Emancipation Proclamation, I can’t remember, but he had to physically fight people to get to the podium because of how many people were descending on him to try to harm him to make sure he couldn’t get there. It’s incredible the extent to which Frederick Douglass put his life, everything on the line just to go up there and make the case for understanding a very basic American value, supporting abolition.

Nico Perrino: Well, Sarah McLaughlin, the book is Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, available now. Sarah, thanks for coming on the show.

Sarah McLaughlin: Thank you, Nico.

Nico Perrino: I am Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIREcolleagues, including Sam Li, who also produces the podcast. To learn more about So to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. We’re also on X, which you can find by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk, and you can send feedback to sotospeak@the��֭����.org. Again, that is sotospeak@the��֭����.org. If you enjoy this episode, please leave us a review. We take reviews on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcast. They help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, thanks again for listening.