← New Books Network
New Books Network
Sarah McLaughlin, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
00:41:51
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
A
I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in store, online and in the app because your personal best is greater than any.
- [00:29]
B
This episode.
- [00:30]
A
Is brought to you by State Farm.
- [00:32]
B
Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help.
- [00:39]
A
You choose an option that's right for you.
- [00:41]
B
Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there Prime Delivery is fast how fast are we talking? We're talking puzzle toys and lick pad delivered so fast you can get this puppy under control fast. Pee pads, gully mat, peg hammer fast and fast. And those training treats? Faster than you can say sit. Fast. Fast. Free delivery. It's on prime welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:14]
A
I'm Caleb Zakrin, Editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm Speaking with Sarah McLaughlin, Senior Scholar of Global Expression at the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. We're discussing Sarah's important new book, Authoritarians in the how the Internationalization of Higher education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech American universities offer some of the best educational experiences in the world. Students from everywhere flock to the United States with the hopes of attaining a coveted four year degree. In an ideal world, US Colleges should be hubs for free thought and vigorous debate. In many halls and corners of academia, this is still the case. Yet numerable instances of censorship have proliferated in recent years. One of the most alarming trends in censorship comes from the threats posed by authoritarian regimes outside of the United States who want to police their citizens on US soil, often keeping them from engaging in protests and criticisms of the countries they hail from. Unfortunately, US Institutions have all too often given these regimes cover. Sarah describes the frustrating state of free expression on campuses in this vital book. Sarah, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:22]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
- [02:25]
A
You really cover here, a topic that I wasn't fully familiar with. I wasn't aware of the extent to which authoritarian regimes like China are really concerned with Chinese students on US Campuses and policing their speech, making sure that they're not engaging in. In the types of arguments, the types of debates that we really uphold and think of as key values of higher education. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. But before even jumping into the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
- [02:54]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So I have been at Fire foundation for Individual Rights and Expression for, oh, a long time now. It's been maybe 12, 13 years. And in my early time at Fyre, I was working with some students and professors who came to fire for help because they were dealing with censorship on campus. Whether it was because they tweeted something that the university didn't like, they taught something in class. And I also personally have just been writing about global censorship issues for a long time and have a lot of interest in the state of free expression around the world. And over time, I was starting to see that those two interests of mine were converging to a certain extent. I was realizing that, you know, the world is a lot more interconnected than we sometimes realize. And these censorship fights that are happening around the world, they don't stay there. They, you know, we have mass movement of people around the world. We have ideas, we have institutions that are really on a global scale. And so we have to understand that, you know, if something happens in China, that doesn't mean it's going to stay there. And so I decided to write this book after spending years researching and writing about and speaking with the people who were impacted by authoritarian governments like China interfering with college campuses and trying to control and interfere with what could be said, researched and studied, you know, on college campuses right in the heart of the United States.
- [04:28]
A
Chinese censorship is a central focus of the book. I was wondering if you could just introduce listeners to the initial censorship case that you look at on George Washington University's campus.
- [04:40]
B
Yeah, so this one, it's funny, I had sat down and started to write about. Start to write this book. And then just a week or two later, one of the central examples I discussed in this book happened at George Washington University. There it was, ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Right before it, some students had decided to post flyers from a Chinese Australian artist that criticized the Beijing Winter Olympics. And if you looked at these posters from a distance, you might even think that they're supporting the Games and promotional posters for the Games. But when you get a little bit closer, you see that's really not the case. And essentially what they depict is kind of like faceless representations of the Beijing teams, you know, represented alongside China's human rights violations. So against Hong Kong, against Tibetans, against Uyghurs. And so it was just trying to essentially make the point that there was a moral and ethical problem with China hosting the Beijing Winter Olympics. You know, this is pretty basic stuff to take place on a college campus. You know, commenting on public events, on, know, major global powers. That's pretty basic stuff. So it's understandable that these students thought that they would be free to engage in this kind of expression. That turned out to not quite be the case. So shortly after students anonymously put up these posters by this artist, student groups complained to the university president at gw and they said, you know, these posters were hurtful, offensive, they insult China. They're unacceptable to have on a campus that, you know, welcomes these students from around the world. And this would have been the appropriate moment for a university to say, you have your own free speech rights. We understand that you don't like this expression, but we don't censor here. You're free to engage in counterspeech. But that's not what happened. GW's president at the time, he said, I agree these posters personally offended me. He directed the university not only to take them down, but, but to also investigate who put them up and try to find out who posted these flyers. And at the time, I, along with other critics, said, what are you thinking, George Washington? Why are you trying to unmask students who anonymously criticized the Chinese government? Because that's essentially what this was. And I also said at the time, think of the harm and the risk that you're putting these students under. Should they be international students from China who are criticizing their own government on a campus in the United States where they expect to have their rights respected? And it turns out that was the case. There were international students from China who were engaging in this expression, criticizing their own government. And you know, GW's president, to his credit, he realized he made a mistake and he said, I, you know, this was wrong. Students have the right to express their minds. But, you know, he kind of eliminated the trust that these students could have for their university that their rights were going to be respected. And you know, as I write about the book, students traveling here from China, they know that the government is watching what they say, but they at least expect, or should be able to expect that their universities that entice them here, promising them free speech, promising them the ability to express themselves, they should at least be able to trust that their university isn't going to worsen the situation, the censorship that's following them. And that's unfortunately what happened at gw. And you know, it's the case that a lot of international students are in. I think they don't know if they can truly trust that their university is going to defend their rights or can't even trust that they won't put them at risk of frankly, severe prosecution when they return home.
- [08:50]
A
You look at other cases too. At Cornell and Carnegie Mellon, for example, you know, students, oftentimes it seems to be the case. Students either protesting China's activities against the Uyghurs, protesting situation in Tibet, protesting issues related to Hong Kong. And you talk a little about the dynamics of Chinese students, about how they react and just the difficulty, the difficult situation that they're in because they know that they are on some level being surveilled. So what's the sort of experience that they're going through, for example, in these cases?
- [09:22]
B
Yeah, so I, I, I've heard from these students and the feeling that they're being surveilled is pervasive. And it comes from a few different directions. So they know that what they say online, there's probably someone watching them. They know that anything that they say on the Internet could very well follow them for a long time. So that's one method of surveillance. There's even the fear that some of their classmates are going to watch what they say, report back. And it's been the case at some universities. There was a particularly galling example at Purdue University where a student who engaged in a memorial event about the Tiananmen massacre, his classmates threatened to report him to the Chinese government because he was breaking the laws in China while in the United States. And so that's another angle. They might have to worry that their peers perhaps could be reporting on them if they choose to do so. And there's also the risk of consulates. Chinese consulates are pretty frequent actors on the global stage trying to surveil and interfere with free speech. There's just a case actually just a few weeks ago out of Thailand, where Chinese officials visited a gallery in Bangkok and demanded that this gallery in a totally different country take down artwork criticizing the Chinese government. And it succeeded. And so, you know, this is a global scale effort originating from the Chinese government. I think there are a lot of different ways that these students know it's following them. And so if you're a student on campus here, you understand that there are a lot of different factors and risks to your rights than to the rest of your classmates. And it's something that you have to take into consideration before you write a paper, speak out in class, attend a protest. You know, with the rise in facial recognition, you know, if you're photographed at a protest and it's posted on the Internet, that could follow you for a very long time. So, you know, between tech and some kind of low tech, old school methods of censorship and surveillance, there are a lot of different threats to these students rights.
- [11:36]
A
Look at institutions like the Confucius Institutes that pop up on campuses, or the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. How do these organizations operate?
- [11:47]
B
Yeah, so when we look at the new question of Confucius Institutes, you know, these as a method of engagement and interference, for the most part, it's died out in the United States because there has been a lot of public pressure against universities that host the Confucius Institutes. And for readers who aren't familiar with them, essentially they are a partnership between an American university and a Chinese university that's coordinated and managed by the Chinese government. And so there's funding, teaching staff, teaching materials that are sent to the American university. And, you know, it's a nice bonus sometimes for universities to have this. It's a little bit more money that's coming in. And especially when language education is increasingly at risk and underfunded in the US it's sort of an easy way for universities to pad out that area of education. But it does something else too. Unfortunately, there have been some incidents of Confucius Institutes and the people who run them interfering to try to control, you know, not what happens within their own institutes, but what happens outside of them too. And there have been incidents where people who work for these institutes have complained to university leadership when there's most often an invitation to the Dalai Lama to attend campus or speak at an event. And so, you know, the on the record, proven instances of interference, there's, you know, not too, too many. But the relationship itself is concerning because when you have a university that is taking money from a foreign government, it can create pressure on the university to abide by that government's preferences to protect that funding source. And I've heard from students that, you know, when they walk down campus and see a Confucius Institute in a hallway, they feel like the Chinese government is there. They feel like the government's kind of followed them here to the US and then when it comes to the CSSA chapters, Chinese students and scholars associations, that's what I had been mentioning earlier when we were talking about some incidents at these campuses. For example, the CSSA chapter was Central to the controversy towards Washington University, these are student groups that are meant to provide a meeting space and coordination for students coming to the US From China. There's nothing wrong with this in theory. Most student groups are that, to start with, they're just a meeting place for people with shared background, interests, values to meet, to hold events. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But the way that CSSA chapters have conducted themselves at campuses across the US has been very troubling. They have been involved in efforts to call for the disinvitation of speakers that are critical of the Chinese government censorship of speech that, you know, is critical of the ccp. There's a particularly galling example at the University of Chicago, where the CSSA chapter at that school called on the university to disinvite Nathan Law, who was a exiled democracy activist from Hong Kong, to disinvite him from a speaker series because they said his speech was, you know, outside the protections of freedom of expression, which is not accurate. And, you know, they made an interesting argument that, you know, the university was not being a welcoming space for students from China because, you know, these speakers with these offensive, hurtful views were being welcomed, welcomed at the university. And so it's sort of played into an interesting debate about, you know, to what extent does a university have to, you know, protect and be aware of the sensitivities of the students attending it, and what does it have to do when they say that a speaker is hurtful or offensive or insensitive to them? And so that's been the crux of some of these calls for censorship, that having a Uyghur speaker, a Tibetan speaker, is unfair to the students who attend the university.
- [16:06]
A
Lowe's knows you've got a job to do, and we help get it done. With the Myloes Pro Rewards program, eligible members save more with volume discounts on qualifying orders through a quote of $2,000 or more. Join for free today. Lowes we help you save Offer can't be combined with any other discount contract.
- [16:27]
B
And or special pricing exclusions.
- [16:29]
A
More terms and restrictions apply. Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change. Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront.
- [16:57]
B
Payment of $45 for 3 month plan $15 per month equivalent required New customer offer first 3 months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Keep visit strayer. Edu Jack welchmba to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
- [17:34]
A
We also look at not just the student body, but also scholars, how scholars have felt censorship or been censored. Specifically scholars who study Tibet or other aspects related to Chinese studies or Chinese history that they don't necessarily, the Chinese government doesn't necessarily want scholars digging into what does that look like?
- [17:56]
B
Yeah. So, you know, a key thing to understand about the way that the Chinese government operates in this scale is that they're not always going to censor every single time and they're not always going to punish every single scholar. But they have punished enough of them and they have targeted enough of them that scholars understand that it is a risk if you choose a field or an area of study that the Chinese government will dislike. The number one risk there is visa denials. So if you need to do on the ground research, if you want to be able to travel throughout China, or if you even have family there that you'd like to be able to visit, visa revocations or denials are a pretty effective way for the Chinese government to create fear among scholars that they should stay away from material that is too dangerous and that might create some problems for them. And, you know, I think anybody who knows anything at all about academia understands that it's not the most career friendly field at the moment. And it's, you know, it's, it's worrying if you feel that you will not be able to complete your research if you're going to have opportunities taken away from you. You know, it's not good for your job security if you think that your area of study is going to create political problems for you. And so I think for academics, that's, you know, just one of the fears. But something I want people to understand is that it doesn't just affect what people will study right now. This is something scholars know and understand and it could change, you know, the path of someone's career they might say, you know what, looking at studying Tibetan is going to just be too much trouble for me. It's going to limit my ability to work in this field. So I'm going to choose a slightly safer route. And so what happens, you know, on a larger scale if we have too many people who are avoiding dangerous or risky passive scholarship because they don't want to risk visa revocations down the line? And I've spoken with some academics who tell me that they have just resigned themselves to the fact that they're not going back to China or Hong Kong because they don't even want to ask themselves if they should self censor because it's, you know, it's better to just say now I plan to not go and I'm just going to study what I want rather than to have to play this dangerous game of how much is enough to self censor and still be able to travel.
- [20:32]
A
I mean, while firebrand scholars who aren't afraid to deal with challenging topics can do excellent work to a certain extent too, when you think of any topic, it's nice to think that there are, you know, academics who are maybe like a little bit more, you know, docile that want to study a difficult topic. And if they're being turned away, well, they actually might do some really great work on a topic because they're, you know, they're maybe not as emotionally invested in the issue at hand. So I think it's really bad for, for research on a lot of these topics when people get turned away because they're afraid. And there is this incredible chilling effect where even one or two or three cases, if you hear someone in your field getting censored or being threatened in some way, then it's really scary. It can really be scary for people.
- [21:24]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And especially I think for people who are earlier in their careers. I've spoken to scholars who reach a certain point where they say, I have tenure, I think I'll be retiring in a few years. I'm going to say what I want now, but, you know, sort of a summer question. But tenure is on its way out too, for many people. So, you know, the protections for someone who wants to say, I don't care, I'm not afraid, they aren't really as available to as many people at this point. So I think you have a lot more people who have these same fears but don't have the protections that, you know, perhaps late career scholars have you.
- [22:03]
A
You discussed the, the issue at GW where the, you know, actual administrator was initially involved in the censorship. And, and you go through other cases too of how American universities and administrators are involved, are complicit when it comes to the censorship promoted by the Chinese government. And you, you go through many different reasons why, from financial incentives to, to other reasons. But I was wondering if you could explain this a little bit that, you know, why is it that American universities that so often profess to care about free expression, why are they allowing a foreign government to meddle in their affairs?
- [22:41]
B
Yeah, there's, there's a few different reasons that you can, you know, I don't think there's a one size fits all, but I do think if you want to make, you know, just a broader, you know, claim, it's, it's money for the most part. I think universities are, you know, it's no secret that funding has been a major problem for a lot of universities for the past few decades. Universities are, they're always looking for funding sources, they're always looking to maintain those sources. And it's pretty simple. The more that universities act like businesses, which is something I discussed in the book, I think we're seeing more of the corporate university these days than the values driven institution. Yeah. So the more universities look like businesses, the more they're going to act like them. And so if you have a university that's is very concerned about the money it's bringing in, it's very concerned about its brand. If you have a large bureaucratic institution that wants to ensure that, you know, it's making donors happy, it's making partners happy, it's maintaining all of its ties, there are going to be incentives there for them to appease partners. And in this case, partners are sometimes authoritarian governments like China or like the uae. And so, you know, there isn't anything inherently wrong with university having partnerships and ties overseas. There can be a lot of good that comes from it. But there's been a resistance on the part of universities to admit that there are incentives that come from having these relationships and that those incentives are very often going to be detrimental to free expression.
- [24:22]
A
You go through, not just America, censorship in America being pushed for by places like China. You don't just talk about China, obviously, it's a huge focus. You talk about other places too, that, that enforce this type of censorship. But you do sort of a tour around the world, you look at, at Europe and New Zealand and Canada, places like Hungary, where there's been a lot of censorship. Could you just introduce a little bit some of the, the most egregious forms of Censorship that you've seen in other places around the world, places that also, you know, we would expect to have similar respect for First Amendment issues. Obviously it's not called the First Amendment, but free expression.
- [25:03]
B
Sure. You know, it's, it's if there are large, if there's a university system around the world and it has a lot of international students, if it's looking for funding, if it's trying to build a global brand like the US Universities are, it's going to have all of the same problems. And as I write about in the book, you can see that this isn't just an American problem. You, it's a problem that is facing global higher ed generally. And so, you know, some of the things I was discussing on US campuses where there was perhaps pressure on universities to censor speech that's critical of the Chinese government on the basis that it's hurtful or offensive. You could see these things at Canadian universities where students attempted to get a weaker speaker disinvited. And the student group that invited her, they wanted her, that group investigated on universities hate speech policies. And it's, I think for many people it should be a pretty shocking thing the idea that a university's hate speech rule should be applied against someone talking about human rights violations being committed by the Chinese government. But nevertheless, that is something that we're seeing. And there was another disturbing case in Canada where a student who is Tibetan, but she's Tibetan Canadian, but that wasn't, you know, the core of her campaign, but she was running for student office and she received so many threats, threats of violence, death threats, that the, she had to go to the university to talk them about security. She felt that they, you know, didn't do everything they should have to protect her. But even the local consulate, the local Chinese consulate seemed to approve of the threats that she was getting, all because she simply was, you know, publicly discussing Tibet and dared to run for a student office at her university. Similar things happened in Australia where the Chinese consulate seemed to approve of, or at least not criticize, threats of violence against critics of the Chinese government there. And it's, you know, the surveillance, the censorship, the fears that students are being watched. This is very prevalent in the UK where there's a large international student population from China as well. These things follow students wherever they go. When you leave China as a student, you don't leave the Chinese government. And so it doesn't really matter where they go. And this is, I think, something that most of them know and eventually all of them learn when they Leave there is that authoritarianism follows you and your university, if it even wants to protect you can only do so much against that.
- [27:48]
A
You focus a lot on the experience and fears of Chinese students in America. But another aspect of it as well is, you know, the non Chinese students, the American born students or the American born administrators who sometimes are susceptible to what you describe as sensitivity exploitation where they don't necessarily understand the issues or the conditions that are facing, facing students and sometimes can be manipulated almost to look the other way or to think that, oh well, you know, freedom of speech maybe is a Western value, that, you know, we should be sensitive to other cultures. How is this sort of sensitivity weaponized?
- [28:31]
B
Yeah, I think there can be a lack of political fluency on behalf of some administrators at these universities who don't totally understand the political disputes or human rights issues that they're kind of being dragged into to mediate between students and that they sometimes refer to a much larger scale political issue somewhere else in the world. And that's why, as I write about in the book, it's my concern about universities having or failing to have viewpoint neutral protections for freedom of expression because those are the kinds of things that students can appeal to to have this kind of speech censored. So if you're a university and you have a policy against offensive speech in some manner, you know, the question of what is offensive is a very subjective one and it allows an avenue for people to demand censorship of, you know, in this case, perhaps critics of the Chinese government. And so that's why it's, it's wiser and easier for universities to take a step back and say, you know, we're not going to be the arbiter of what's offensive and what's not and who gets to speak because that puts them in a situation where they might be asked to be, you know, censoring someone who's trying to whistleblow on human rights violations. And it's that kind of reflexive desire to be seen as conscientious of student sensitivities can go to a bad place if universities are careless about it. I think as we have seen in.
- [30:06]
A
Some cases, that's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6E Tron and the quiet confidence of ultra smooth handling. The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV. This is electric performance redefined.
- [30:23]
B
Take the next 30 seconds to invest in yourself with Vanguard. Breathe in. Center your mind. Recognize the power you have to direct your financial future. Feel the freedom that comes with reaching your goals and Building a life you love. Vanguard brings you this meditation because we invest where it matters most in you. Visit Vanguard investinginyou to learn more. All investing is subject to risk.
- [30:52]
A
She's made up her mind to live pretty smart Learn to budget responsibly right from the start. She spends a little less in boots more into savings Keeps her blood pressure low and credit score raises she's cutting debt right out of her life. She tracks of cash boring money moves make kind of lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. BNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865. You also look at the internationalization of higher education, especially American institutions. There are so many American institutions that are establishing campuses in places like China, places like the uae, Qatar, elsewhere. To some extent, you know, this is, this is a great thing. You know, it allows students to go and experience different cultures. It can be very positive. Of course, I studied abroad. I had a great time doing it. Not in one of the countries that you examine, but nonetheless, it was still great to have that experience. But of course, the way that the universities have gone about this, in many ways, it's gone against their, their. Their values that they promote. They've. They've suppressed certain values of free expression in an effort to expand. Can you talk about this expansion internationally?
- [32:17]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I think universities have had this desire to be seen as global institutions, and I understand why. There are a lot of incredible benefits that come from being a global brand. You can create better opportunities for students around the world. You can, you know, host them at different campuses, different research. There are a lot of opportunities that come with it, but there are also a lot of downsides that come with it. And the problem here is that universities have not been sufficiently honest about what those downsides are. And pretty basic one is that a lot of the countries that universities have been expanding to have significantly different legal protections for certain kinds of sports speech and research and expression. And so when there's a lack of desire to be honest about that, it can send the wrong message. And it could even mislead students who say, okay, I'm going to go to Northwestern University in Qatar. I'm going to have this amazing experience. I'm going to have these opportunities. You need to be honest with these students and scholars and academics before they go there, because they shouldn't be sold a false bill about what the experience is going to be. So the university I brought up there in Northwestern, there was a particularly galling incident a few years ago where the university invited a Lebanese rock band for an event on the campus and the lead singer of that band is openly gay. And so the university then backtracked. They canceled it. They said, we'll host this at our home institution in the US Instead. And they said there were security reasons why they had to do so. But the Qatar foundation, which is a state linked partner of the campus, the partner of American universities who expand into Qatar, they came out with a statement, they said, wait, that's not what happened. This event was canceled because it was not in accordance with Qatari law and social customs. So which is it? Northwestern promises free expression and makes these flowery commitments to what kind of speech and academic freedom protections are on its campus. But then there's the pretty big exception of Qatari law and social customs. And so which is it? What can students really expect when they go there? There was a similar incident that went down the same path at Georgetown's campus there over a debate about female depictions of God. And so universities just need to be honest, you know, whether or not these campuses are a good idea in the first place is sort of a separate question of have the universities been honest about them? And you know, I think as a preliminary matter, if you're not going to be upfront about what rules are on the ground in a country where you're expanding to, maybe it's not so wise for you to be expanding there in the first place. It makes me question the wisdom of that if there can't even be the base level of transparency about what exactly local laws say about what speech is legal.
- [35:27]
A
Obviously, since this book has been written, a lot has occurred when it comes to how people think about, talk about censorship on college campuses. There's been a few instances of, you know, legal foreign residents in the United States on US Campuses being having their speech suppressed by the US Government or by other institutions. So there's, you know, there have been, there have been plenty of issues. But I'm wondering just in terms of thinking very broadly about this, this issue, how you're thinking about it. There's some of the ideas that you really try and communicate to people about why it's so important to protect speech, to embrace the idea that, that people, even if they're studying something or have an idea that you might not agree with, why it's so important that you protect someone that might be, you know, your adversary in a debate context. So could you give your, your, your general pitch as someone who's been doing this professionally, you know, for fighting the good fight for 12 to 13 years?
- [36:24]
B
Yeah, well, you know, I, I, I Wish that I had had a few more months to be writing this book because I think there would be a couple new chap added in there about what's been happening in the past few months. But, you know, the same reason why I wrote this book is what is disturbing and upsetting me about what's happening in the US Today. I am deeply troubled by government efforts to silence speech and critics within the university system and so to speak. See, you know, these efforts multiply so quickly from the Trump administration in the past six months has been, you know, very disturbing and a fire. We have been pushing back against this because, you know, a lot of it is not just liberal, but explicitly unconstitutional. So, you know, it's not just about, you know, broader norms of free expression. It's also about the legal protections for speech and the limits on government power. And so, you know, the case that I'm making with this book that I, you know, want higher education to be a free space for the world's dissidents and dissenters to be able to, you know, speak their minds, I would make the same case what's happening the past six months. I, I want us to find ways to protect higher education against authoritarian efforts to, to silence it. And I think, you know, something I discuss in the book is that I'm really worried about the state of free expression around the world today. I think things are getting worse at a alarming scale, and I think higher education is kind of the baseline for a free society. If your universities, you know, the places where our knowledge is produced, where political debate often starts, if those places aren't free, society won't be free. So to see these attacks on all sides from universities and deeply worried about our ability to preserve these rights in our society more broadly, no matter what your political views are. And so I hope people understand that free universities are. They're not a left or a right thing. They are just a basic thing that all of us need if we're going to have knowledge that we can trust. We're going to have spaces where people can, around the world can come and speak freely about, you know, politics, research, economics, human rights, medicine. You know, these things matter in nearly every field of study.
- [39:11]
A
I think that's so important to highlight too, that it's not a left or right issue, it's a political issue, of course, but it's an issue about principles, not just about one's ideology. And I think that, you know, for anyone who follows the, you know, various crackdowns on censorship or issues related to free speech, that you know, for every case that you might find where you might not necessarily be sympathetic to the person who's being censored or the person who's being being attacked, there will be a case where you feel that. Where you feel like your own views, your own values are being attacked. It might not be in the same context, it might not be from the same people. But I think that having that, that broader principled understanding of the importance of re. Expression is just so integral to higher education and what makes it good. That's not to say that every single opinion should be given equal weight, equal value, of course, but, you know, having thoughtful debate, thoughtful discussion and letting people that really have something to say speak and let them be heard is, I think, so unbelievably important for actually having productive debate in society.
- [40:15]
B
Yeah, I completely agree. And one alarming trend that I've been noticing recently is that it seems like people think of freedom of expression as sort of like a limited resource where, you know, to keep some of it for me, I have to stop other people from having it. And it's actually the other way around. The more you protect it for other people, the more you protect it for yourself too. So, you know, it's. It's not this thing where there's only some of it for some of us. In fact, you know, the more we try to limit for others, the more we limit it for ourselves too. So I hope people understand that, you know, it's kind of like a branch that we're all sitting on and you can't just saw off one person. Eventually we're all going to get sawed off too.
- [40:57]
A
I think that's such a great metaphor. And you know, this work that you, that you get into, I think, you know, unfortunately it just does day by day seem to become more and more important. Not just the United States, but, but globally. It really does. Does feel that, you know, some of the core, the core notions of, you know, what, what a free society requires are being, are being questioned. And, you know, there are pathways that I really, that seem to be going down in some ways and I really just can, you know, hope that people like you continue to do this great work. So. Yeah. Sarah, it was really wonderful to have you on the New Books Network. It's just been an absolute pleasure to speak with you.
- [41:38]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
- [41:40]
A
Look forward to the next book that you write.
- [41:45]
B
I have some ideas.
- [41:46]
A
Yeah, I'm sure you do.