--- title: How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias When There Is None description: College students are learning forms of protest and victimization that make it harder for Americans with different opinions to debate canonical: https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/ author: Heather Mac Donald article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-09-14T16:00:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:49:02.561Z article:section: Ideas og:title: How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist og:description: And the delusion continues once they leave school og:url: https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71835de12b945f54/69893a2b096a9429756a3712/diversity-delusion-college-university-protests-racism-sexism.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Students and protesters at University of North Carolina og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist twitter:description: And the delusion continues once they leave school twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71835de12b945f54/69893a2b096a9429756a3712/diversity-delusion-college-university-protests-racism-sexism.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=ef80e6d6-6691-48f1-be75-5ea6750b1380&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Can President Trump Pardon Himself? Brett Kavanaugh Won't Say [Watch (HLS stream): Can President Trump Pardon Himself? Brett Kavanaugh Won't Say](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/UUpvGsb3.m3u8) (2:18)  _Published 2018-09-05. Judge Brett Kavanaugh declined to answer two questions from Democratic senators related to presidential investigations during his confirmation hearing — if a president should comply with a subpoena and if he has the ability to self-pardon._ by [Heather Mac Donald](https://time.com/author/heather-mac-donald/) ## Heather Mac Donald Sep 14, 2018 4:00 PM UTC  Students and protesters surround the plinth where the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier nicknamed Silent Sam once stood on the University of North Carolina campus, after a demonstration for its removal in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Aug. 20, 2018. Students and protesters surround the plinth where the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier nicknamed Silent Sam once stood on the University of North Carolina campus, after a demonstration for its removal in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Aug. 20, 2018. Jonathan Drake—REUTERS by [Heather Mac Donald](https://time.com/author/heather-mac-donald/) ## Heather Mac Donald Sep 14, 2018 4:00 PM UTC “You have blood on your hands. You’re a murderer,” shouted one of the protesters at [Judge Brett Kavanaugh](http://time.com/5389449/brett-kavanaugh-contraception-abortion-inducing-drugs/) during the Senate hearings of [his nomination to the Supreme Court](http://time.com/5388614/kamala-harris-brett-kavanaugh-mueller-probe-senate-hearing/). This apocalyptic rhetoric had been espoused before — at none other than the Yale Law School, immediately after President Donald Trump announced the school’s graduate as his chosen replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy. There, a group of alumni and professors circulated an open letter declaring that selecting Kavanaugh “presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country.” People “will die” if Kavanaugh is confirmed, the letter announced. By the time of the hearings, Kavanaugh had gone from being a _future_ murderer to an actual one. These protests, intended to shut down the proceedings — and the fantastical social-media charge that one of Kavanaugh’s former clerks displayed a white-power sign during those hearings — showed how academic identity politics is transforming the non-academic world. To be sure, there were differences: the Capitol police actually intervened to restore order and the Judiciary Committee is ideologically balanced. But the long-term prognosis for reason and civility is not good. The key feature of academic diversity ideology is the assertion that to be a member of an ever-growing number of favored victim groups at a college today is to be the target of pervasive bigotry on campus — despite, well, being favored. Taught by a metastasizing campus-diversity bureaucracy to believe that they are subject to an existential threat from circumambient bias, students equate nonconforming ideas with “hate speech,” and “hate speech” with conduct that should be punished, censored and repelled with force if necessary. This victimology fuels the efforts to shut down speech that challenges campus orthodoxies. Dozens of times in the past several years alone, classrooms have been invaded; professors, accosted and even assaulted; and outside speakers, silenced. While these tactics have famously been directed at conservatives, that is not exclusively the case, as senior fellow at the Public Policy Center [Stanley Kurtz](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/year-shout-down-worse-you-think-campus-free-speech/) has documented for [_National Review Online_](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/campus-free-speech-crisis-deepens/). It has happened year after year, recently. In October 2017, protesters at Columbia University temporarily occupied a class and accused a professor who is [an LGBTQ rights advocate](https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/2017/03/suzanne-goldberg-honored-leadership-new-york-citys-lgbtq-community) and one of the school’s premier [proponents of the idea that campuses are pervaded by rape culture](https://president.columbia.edu/news/suzanne-goldberg-sexual-assault-prevention) of creating a “dangerous environment for students, including queer students.” That same month, shouting activists prevented University of Oregon President Michael Schill [from delivering his State of the University Speech](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/opinion/fascism-protest-university-oregon.html). Schill’s merely pro forma support for free speech was enabling “fascism and white supremacy,” according to the student protesters. In November 2016, Kimberly Peirce, director of the groundbreaking 1999 film on transgenderism, _Boys Don’t Cry_, was [shouted down at Reed College](https://reason.com/blog/2016/12/09/leftist-students-shouted-fck-you-bitch-a) with slogans like “f-ck your respectability politics.” Dozens of Yale students mobbed sociologist [Nicholas Christakis](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/nyregion/yale-professor-protests-christakis-honored-sterling.html) for three hours in October 2015 because his psychologist and faculty member wife had circulated an email suggesting that students could select their own Halloween costumes without oversight from Yale’s diversity bureaucrats. “Be quiet!” shrieked a girl at Christakis, who was frozen in his place. “[You should not sleep at night!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD%5FJVYd0&feature=youtu.be) You are disgusting!” Another mobster complained that Christakis’s invocation of free speech creates “a space to allow for violence to happen on this campus.” When he meekly disagreed, the protester shouted back: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not … It’s not a debate.” The list goes on — from [Rutgers](https://quillette.com/2017/10/29/get-bus-get-shouting-free-speech-rutgers/) in New Jersey and [American University](http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/29/au-campus-safe-from-title-ix-hate-speech) in Washington, D.C., to [U.C. Berkeley](https://jonathanturley.org/2017/10/09/well-beings-are-being-put-on-the-line-berkeley-protesters-interrupt-class-to-protest-the-midterm-exam-as-too-stressful/) in California and [Evergreen State College](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTnDpoQLNaY) in Washington and beyond. In none of these instances were the silencers disciplined. In several of them, the college presidents thanked the anti-speech advocates for their courageous stands. Yale conferred its prize for “provid\[ing\] exemplary leadership in race and/or ethnic relations” on [two of Christakis’s scourges](https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/235844/yale-cements-its-line-in-the-academic-sand-by-awarding-the-student-truthtellers-who-bullied-faculty), including the student who shouted, “It’s not a debate.” The belief that college campuses today pose an existential threat to females and students of color is just as lunatic as the belief that Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a murderer or that an Establishment lawyer was signaling her white supremacy affiliation on live TV. American universities are among the most tolerant environments in history towards humanity’s traditionally oppressed groups. Far from discriminating against what admissions officers call “underrepresented minorities,” or “URMs,” every selective college today employs large racial admissions preferences to engineer what they call a “diverse” student body — and they twist themselves into knots to hire qualified minority staff members who haven’t already been snapped up by better-endowed schools. Professors want all their students to succeed, particularly females and “underrepresented minorities.” But the resulting campus culture often coaches students to see bias where none exists. That delusion continues once they leave school. The result is a growing society-wide intolerance for speakers and ideas that fail to conform to an increasingly exacting code of political correctness, on the ground that such non-conforming speech harms favored victim groups. The right has its shrill manias— whether the unseemly obsession with Hillary Clinton and her emails, the corrosive Trump-fueled calumny that federal law enforcement agencies have been corrupted by political bias, and the dangerous Trump-induced crusade to turn those agencies into instruments of political revenge. But until now, the notion that silencing non-conforming speech is a legitimate response to disagreement has come overwhelmingly from campuses and other progressive institutions — from [Google](http://time.com/5093549/james-damore-diversity-memo-google-lawsuit/) to [the _New Yorker_](http://time.com/5385603/new-yorker-steve-bannon/). Were Trump to seize the same weapons, arrogating to himself the power to define and punish “hate speech,” the danger of such precedents might become clearer to all. The new censorship is an outgrowth of the twin ideas that race and gender are the most important features of a human being, and that American society is one long assault on various identity groups defined by race and gender. Until these key tenets of academic identity politics are rebutted, we can expect to see more of the hysteria that characterized the Kavanaugh hearings — and less ability to talk across ideological divides. ## Transcript Can a sitting president be required to respond to a subpoena? So that's a hypothetical question about what would be an elaborationary difference from US [ UNKNOWN ] Nixen's precise holding, and I think Going with the Justice Ginsburg principle. Which is really not the Justice Ginsburg alone principle it's everyones principle on the current supreme court. And it's a matter of the canons of judicial independence. I can't give you an answer on that hypothetical question. So you can't give me an answer on whether a president has to Respond to subpoena from a court of law. As my, there's, my understanding is that you're asking me to give my view on a potential hypothetical and that's something that every, each of the [ UNKNOWN ] justices currently sitting on the supreme court when they are sitting in my seat, declined to Decide potential hyperthetical cases. Trump claims he has an absolute right to pardon himself. Does he? Now the question of self pardons is something I have never analysed. It's a question that I have not written about. It's a question, therefore, that's a hypothetical question. That I can't begin to answer What about. in this context as a sitting judge and as a nominee to the Supreme Court. And the other half of that is the obvious one does a president have the ability to pardon somebody In exchange for a promise for that person, they wouldn't testify against him. Sir, I'm not gonna answer hypothetical questions of that sort. And there's a good reason for it when we get, Judges don't, when we decide we get briefs and arguments to the parties. We have a record. We have an appendix with all the information. We have amicus briefs, I never decide anything alone. I'm in a panel of three and if I'm confirmed to the Supreme Court I'll be on a team of nine. Thank you Mr. Chairman I hope for the sake of the country that remains a hypothetical question. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/"},"headline":"How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist","datePublished":"2018-09-14T16:00:29.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:49:02.561Z","description":"And the delusion continues once they leave school","url":"https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/","keywords":["politics","onetime"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71835de12b945f54/69893a2b096a9429756a3712/diversity-delusion-college-university-protests-racism-sexism.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Heather Mac Donald","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/heather-mac-donald/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71835de12b945f54/69893a2b096a9429756a3712/diversity-delusion-college-university-protests-racism-sexism.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Students and protesters at University of North Carolina","caption":"Students and protesters at University of North Carolina","creditText":"Jonathan Drake—REUTERS","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/politics/","name":"politics"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5395131/college-bias-kavanaugh-diversity/","name":"How Colleges Teach Students to See Bias Where It Doesn’t Exist"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Can President Trump Pardon Himself? 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