New book exposes ‘quiet’ censorship by foreign powers at U.S. universities

“There’s sort of a quiet, but deeply serious free speech crisis that’s been going on,” emerging author Sarah McLaughlin says concerning foreign countries’ influence on higher education in the United States.

McLaughlin, a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, recently authored her first book, “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.”

At FIRE, McLaughlin has worked closely with students and faculty on college campuses across the country. After hearing many first-hand testimonies about the inability to speak freely on campus, she took it upon herself to “track down what’s happening.”

McLaughlin wrote the exposé to not only dig into the problems being faced by students and faculty, but also to “shed light on the ways in which American higher education is more susceptible than we realized to foreign governments’ efforts to censor their critics,” she told The College Fix in a recent phone interview.

In the book and in her interview with The Fix, McLaughlin explained the two different types of censorship, explicit and implicit.

Explicit censorship, she said, is when there are clear guidelines for what speech is censored and what speech is allowed. 

Implicit censorship, on the other hand, is an “indirect pressure where it’s not explicitly stated that the university should censor something … but this implicit feeling that they’re expected to do so if they want to maintain the partnerships that they’re developing with these countries.”

As a result, McLaughlin said foreign governments are able to have a hand in U.S. colleges’ and universities’ curriculum and daily life through donations that keep these institutions running.

“We need to find ways to ensure that universities are not being complicit in governments’ global censorship campaigns,” McLaughlin said.

In the book, she writes about the top down censorship that comes from university administrators “all in the name of appeasing foreign powers.” She cites examples “where professors hesitate to discuss controversial topics and in boardrooms where administrators weigh the costs of offending oppressive regimes.”  

In one example from the book, McLaughlin writes about a George Washington University incident in 2022 involving controversial artwork connected to the Beijing Winter Olympics.  

The posters, which anonymous students hung up around campus, alluded “to the violence against Tibetan monks and Uyghurs, China’s initial cover up of COVID-19, and the country’s extensive surveillance regime” to suggest that China should not host the Olympics.

Some students called for censorship and the GWU Chinese Students and Scholars Association asked the university to “severely” punish those involved. 

University leaders agreed and launched an investigation. However, when the incident sparked criticism from free speech organizations and lawmakers, the university dropped it, according to the book.  

The university promised “to protect its students’ free speech, but was quick to violate that commitment to censor artwork criticizing a major world power’s human rights record,” she writes. 

McLaughlin writes that international students are often the ones who are most affected by censorship extended from foreign governments. 

As she told The Fix, these students often have to juggle between the fact that their speech is protected in the United States under the First Amendment, while remembering that the same speech may not be protected in their home country, should they return after their schooling is complete.

Additionally, in the book, McLaughlin connects this idea to the immigration changes currently taking place under President Donald Trump’s administration. She told The Fix she believes some of these reforms will only “aggravate” the fear of censorship and its reach to international students from their home countries.

McLaughlin believes it is the job of the universities to educate international students about their rights here in the United States. 

They must also “admit that they have been careless,” she said. “They have created global partnerships, pursued satellite campuses abroad, and they have to look at all of those … and analyze whether they have adequately protected individual rights at those institutions.”

Additionally, McLaughlin said the steps being taken by the Trump administration in having colleges and universities report where their funding comes from is a great next step in fixing this issue.

For the sake of transparency, McLaughlin said these institutions must report where their money is coming from, as the constant “veil of secrecy” is holding them back from being held accountable, as well as not giving current and prospective students all the information they need.

Donors, students, faculty, and the public have the right to know which foreign governments are funding the colleges and universities responsible for shaping the minds of the next generation, as they can have a large effect on the campus and its day-to-day operations, she said.

As she wrote in the book, “You may not be interested in authoritarianism abroad, but that does not mean it is not interested in you.”