Sarah McLaughlin is Touring NZ with The Conformity Crisis

10 March 2026

MEDIA RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Free Speech Union Brings International Free Speech Scholar Sarah McLaughlin to New Zealand

The Free Speech Union is excited to announce a five-city New Zealand tour with Sarah McLaughlin, Senior Scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), this April.

Titled The Conformity Crisis, the tour will examine one of the most pressing but under-acknowledged challenges facing liberal democracies today: how institutions that once championed open inquiry are becoming risk-averse and conformity-driven - not through explicit coercion, but through the quiet institutionalisation of self-censorship.

McLaughlin is the author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, and her analysis has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times.

Drawing on extensive international research, she will explore how pre-emptive silence is taking hold across universities, governments, corporations, and media - and what it costs us in democratic resilience, public trust, and innovation.

"New Zealand prides itself on openness and democratic integrity," says Jillaine Heather, CEO of the Free Speech Union. "Yet many decisions about what cannot be said, studied, published, or debated now happen before any outside pressure is applied."

The tour will visit five cities across the country:

Auckland – Sunday 19 April

Tauranga – Tuesday 21 April

Wellington – Wednesday 22 April

Christchurch – Thursday 23 April

Dunedin – Friday 24 April

Each evening event will feature a 30-minute lecture followed by a moderated Q&A. Leadership briefings and sector roundtables are available for universities and government bodies, on request.

Tickets are on sale now. 

For media inquiries, interview requests, or event information, please contact the media team at the Free Speech Union: [email protected]. 

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Notes to editor:

Tickets for the tour are only $10 and can be bought through Humantix – they will be on our website shortly. 

FSU Media Contact: Jillaine Heather | [email protected] | 

www.fsu.nz