Fighting campus groupthink: Khan Academy founder’s answer to academic intolerance

American college campuses have become increasingly known as ideological war zones where civil debates get shouted down and partisan pressure forces students and faculty alike to think twice before sharing an unorthodox view. But Khan Academy founder Sal Khan is trying to change all that. 

Khan developed a new college admissions tool, Dialogues, which is now accepted at a litany of top-tier universities, including Columbia, MIT and the University of Chicago. Dialogues is a program hosted on the tutoring platform Schoolhouse.world in which students record conversations on controversial topics – abortion, immigration, Israel and Palestine, among others.

The Dialogues participants then give each other feedback such as “empathetic” and “good listener” and students can then submit a portfolio as part of their college application where their dialogues are graded on a rubric such as “empathetic,” “curious,” “finding common ground” and “good listener.” Students can then choose which feedback they would like to share with colleges and include it in a portfolio to supplement their admissions’ application. 

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“If you think about college campuses, I think most people would agree that college campuses tend to lean left… especially over the last decade, you’ve seen less tolerance for right and even moderate points of view,” Khan told Fox News Digital.

Khan said he was inspired to create Dialogues after noticing that the pressure to self-censor found on many American college campuses was infecting students who haven’t yet stepped foot on a college campus. After a dinner party in his liberal Northern California enclave where the education mogul felt uncomfortable sharing what he felt was a very middle-of-the-road opinion with the left-wing crowd, the idea for Dialogues was born.

“I have been at dinner parties where I felt afraid to share what I thought were actually kind of my moderate views, because people might assume that I’m, you know – you know they might make negative assumptions about me and if that’s happening to me, can you imagine a young person at a college campus?” Khan said to Fox News Digital.

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Khan said he hopes Dialogues will help engender a freer environment for expression at American universities, not just for conservative students, but even for liberal students who may have a more moderate view they are afraid to share. A 2025 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) study found that some 60% of college students felt either very or somewhat uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor on a controversial topic. 

Nearly 50% of students felt somewhat or very uncomfortable sharing their views with other students in communal campus spaces such as a quad. Conservative students reported self-censoring more often than liberal students, according to the study. The study also found that large majorities of students would support not inviting speakers voicing certain controversial views on campus. 

Intellectual diversity on campuses also appears to be lacking. A 2018 study of top U.S. News-ranked liberal arts colleges found that registered-Democratic professors outnumbered registered-Republican professors 12.7 to 1. A 2022 MIWI Institute analysis found that at Ivy League universities, left-leaning students outnumbered conservative students 53% to 25% of the student body. 

Khan aspires to have Dialogues give students the foundations to have difficult conversations with one another, and to increase their understanding of those who have different views than their own.

“Yeah, it’s not a surprise to anyone that you know, the ability for us as a society to have constructive conversations and constructive disagreement across ideological lines seems to have broken down to a large degree. You see this across the board, but you especially see this with young people,” Khan told Fox News Digital.

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Some parents worry that a program centered around students sharing their views on controversial topics could end up being used as a back-door method of discriminating against conservative students. 

“The questions they’re having dialogues about, whether it be climate change or abortion or gun control, you know there’s only one right way to think for these elite institutions,” “Mom Wars” writer and podcast co-host Bethany Mandel told Fox News Digital. 

It wouldn’t be the first time elite schools have used nonconventional tools to achieve desired political outcomes. 

After the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, colleges began leaning more heavily on personal essays in applications so they could determine how race affected their lives – a workaround the Court allowed in its judgment.

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However, Khan points out that students’ conversations are not included in the Dialogues portfolios, only the peer feedback that they voluntarily disclose is included. The portfolios can include the topics covered, but not which side the student took. He also said that the Dialogues team monitors feedback to ensure that no bias is taking place in terms of how students are evaluated. Khan says that he already sees positive results from his program. 

“We had these beautiful conversations where these young people are saying this was the first time that I met an atheist, and it made me want to go deeper into my faith, or it’s the first time I met a religious Christian and I have deeper respect for their convictions now,” Khan told Fox News Digital. “It made me incredibly hopeful for folks… you don’t have to agree with the person, you just have to not think that they’re crazy or that they’re an idiot or racist.”