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The Michael Shermer Show · 2025-08-19 · 70 min · 12,360 words

How Foreign Governments Influence U.S. Universities

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You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. All right, hey everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Sarah McLaughlin.

She is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE, our friends at FIRE, we love them. Sarah graduated Magna Kumlaud from Drexel University in 2014 with a BS in political science and has been working for FIRE ever since, defending students and faculty facing censorship in FIRE's individual rights defense program, where she worked for five years. She's also served as director of FIRE's Targeted Advocacy Program, where she focused on U.S. universities' relationship with international threats to free speech and art censorship, much of what her new book is about.

Her writing about free speech issues, including protest and blasphemy laws, has been featured in publications including Foreign policy, Artsy, The Huntington Post, and the New York Daily News. We have to expand that, Sarah, to include Skeptic magazine. Come on, we gotta get you in here. Here's the new book, Authoritarians in the Academy, How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship threaten free speech.

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