This Friday, May 1, is the enrollment deadline for students in the Class of 2030 who will start on campus next fall. Across the country, high school seniors are choosing whether they want to commit to spending the next four years as Paladins. For Furman, the stakes could not be higher.

But first, a quick announcement: Today is Dins Day — Furman’s annual day of giving. FFSA is not officially affiliated with Furman, but we’d like to this occasion to ask for your support. If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider supporting us today. You may also donate directly here.

Last year, Fitch cited declining freshman enrollment when it revised Furman’s bond outlook from stable to negative. They were right to do so.

Furman’s enrollment of 571 students in 2025 was down by more than 50 students from 2024 figure 621. And this wasn’t just one bad year. It is part of a much broader trend.

The truth is that the incoming freshman class has shrunk nearly every fall since 2014. Indeed, in the decade between 2015 and 2025, total enrollment has dropped from roughly 2,900 students to about 2,380. That’s a loss of more than 500 students, or approximately 17% of the student body.

We have reported on the reasons behind this trend: demographic decline, rising costs, a competitive regional market, and what higher-ed commentator Jeff Selingo has called Furman’s status as a “skip-over school” — caught between the elite liberal arts and cheaper state schools

Others have also reported President Davis’s acknowledgement of this problem and her efforts to reverse this trend, which have so far been unsuccessful. What students choose to do between now and the enrollment deadline will determine whether 2026 is the year that turns the tide.

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In the meantime, we want to examine how Furman’s enrollment trends have consequences that are rippling through every part of the university.

Consider one of Furman’s favorite selling points: its student-faculty ratio. Visit Furman’s website and you’ll find “10:1” everywhere. It’s on the About page. It’s on the Rankings page. It’s certainly on the admissions materials and in the recruiting pitch. The message is clear: Furman offers an intimate, personalized education, and the 10:1 ratio is proof.

But it is worth examining how Furman achieved that 10:1 figure?

In 2015, the ratio was roughly 12:1, after all. Did Furman improve its ratio by strategically investing in faculty — hiring more professors, reducing class sizes, deepening the academic experience? That’s the narrative the administration would like alumni and prospective parents to believe.

But that’s not what the numbers say. The ratio didn’t improve because Furman hired more professors. In fact, data suggest that the faculty count has actually declined over the past decade — from roughly 240 to around 230 today.

The ratio only improved because Furman lost students even more quickly. Here’s a table to illustrate these trends:

This really matters – and it is one of the main problems with Furman’s current enrollment trends. They can easily obfuscate the reality of what’s really happening on campus.

Indeed, there is a difference between a ratio you earned by investing in your faculty and one you backed into by losing 500 students. The former reflects strategic strength. The latter indicates a floundering university attempting to manage its own decline.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Furman has many peer universities with similar or higher student-faculty ratios that are maintaining or increasing their enrollments.

Colby College in Maine is one such example. They have a 10:1 student-faculty ratio just like Furman, but their enrollment has increased significantly in the past decade. In 2015 Colby enrolled roughly 1,850 students: Today it's at 2,412. That’s a gain of over 500 students in a decade, the mirror image of Furman's loss. Their formula was simple: invest heavily in the local community, build new dorms, expand facilities, and maintain a 10:1 ratio while growing.

Furman can and should be doing this. We have a 940-acre campus, world-class facilities, and an ideal location in one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the Southeast. There is absolutely no reason our alma mater should be shrinking.

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At FFSA, we want Furman to grow because we want the university to succeed and because increasing the number of students represents an amazing opportunity for Furman to improve viewpoint diversity on campus.

Consider this: If enrollment grows, and Furman wants to maintain anything like its current 10:1 ratio, it is going to have to hire more professors. Not just to replace the ones who retire or leave each year through normal attrition, but to keep pace with the new students walking through the gates.

The math is simple. If Furman adds even 200 undergraduates over the next several years — a modest goal given that it has lost nearly 350 since 2015 — it would need roughly 20 additional faculty members just to hold the line at 10:1. Add in normal turnover — retirements, departures, contract endings — and the number of hiring decisions ahead of Furman could be very substantial.

Every single one of those hires is a critical opportunity.

At a moment when Furman has received an “F” from FIRE for its free-speech climate, and when students report high levels of self-censorship on campus, each new faculty position is a chance to change the intellectual composition of the university.

Other universities are committing to this sort of reform. A recent report from Yale, put together by an internal Committee on Trust in Higher Education, is
“urging each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its ‘intellectual and methodological commitments’ as well as the ‘range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty’ and ‘the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.’”

Doing the same at Furman will require more than pro-free-speech rhetoric or a dramatic gesture. It will require the steady, cumulative effect of hiring people who bring genuinely different perspectives — political, methodological, philosophical — into Furman’s classrooms.

That all begins with President Davis improving enrollment in the incoming freshman class, which will be finalized this Friday. Stay tuned into our reporting to find out if the tide is turning.

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Our special guest is Tom Neale, chairman of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.
and co-founder of The Jefferson Council for the University of Virginia in 2020.

We will be discussing the future of free on college campuses and how alumni can drive positive change. The webinar will also feature a Q&A where you can ask Tom questions.

To join us, please use this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81269999126?pwd=cqDcG32cmjfaVw72wRGCdGmIYs1CxN.1

We hope to see you there!

Best,
The Furman Free Speech Alliance

This Thursday at 4:00 PM EST, FFSA is hosting its first-ever live webinar — and you won’t want to miss it.

AFSA Chairman Tom Neale will join us for an in-depth conversation on where the fight for free speech on campus is headed in 2026. As one of the most prominent leaders in the campus free speech movement today, Tom brings unmatched insight into the battles shaping the future of open discourse in higher education.

The event will include a live Q&A — a rare chance for our subscribers to put their questions directly to him.

Mark your calendar. This Thursday. 4:00 PM EST.

Welcome to Perspectives on Pathways — a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on Furman’s two-year advising initiative.

This week, we bring you the perspective of Carter Ozburn, a junior Politics and Business major, and former Editor in Chief of The Paladin, Furman’s student newspaper.

Ozburn evaluates different elements of The Pathways Program, including the CliftonStrengths test, career preparation, and academic rigor. While he finds some parts of the program useful, he generally thinks it ought to serve as an optional “college 101,” rather than a mandatory class. Ozburn also questions the effectiveness of the University’s data collection on the program.

Read Ozburn’s full interview below.

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What do you think of Pathways?

I think it’s college 101, it should be one semester, and it should be optional. The curriculum is beneficial, I think, to first-generation students who don’t come from a collegiate background or international students who might be at a cultural disadvantage, but forcing every student to go through it for two years is just a ploy to game the U.S. News and World Report rankings. I just don’t think it’s that beneficial.

I also don’t think it makes sense that the mandatory second year is career focused. It’s not a bad thing in itself, but those resources are available through the Malone Center or the Cothran Center; students just have to actively seek them out, instead of being forced to seek them out. I think that you can provide the necessary information in a mandatory session or two freshman year, and it doesn’t need to be a two year class.

Recently, Jeff Selingo published a book called Dream School, in which he specifically praised Pathways. Why do outside observers evaluate Pathways so highly, when significant numbers of students seem to disapprove of the program?

I have no idea. I think it contributes to the perception we try to cultivate—we’re an innovative college, we’re very sustainable, our campus is gorgeous, etc. I also think they view it as the stepping stone to internships, study away, and certain career objectives. They see it as college 101 and then a launching pad for a career—who wouldn’t want that? In reality though, it should be college 101 for those who need it, and that career advising should be left to those who do it professionally, through the resources which have always been available to students.

What has The Paladin’s reporting on Pathways uncovered in the last year?

We reported on it a lot like when they made the program mandatory. There were tons of “I hate Pathways” op-eds. Eventually we had to be like, “ok, let’s not write the same article every semester.” We did include it in Clay Wallace’s 2025 Administration Approval Survey, which came out two semesters ago. [Quote from survey: “A large, 46% plurality of students expressed disapproving of how the administration managed academic affairs this year. Among the small number of respondents who addressed this issue in the explanation of their responses, Pathways was commonly criticised as negatively affecting academic life.”]

That survey wasn’t focused on Pathways though. It packaged the program along with a wide variety of issues related to the administration. Of course, many students disapproved of the program, but we haven’t done express reporting on it, just out of fear of being redundant.

Pathways’s curriculum makes use of the CliftonStrengths test. What is your appraisal of the test?

I think CliftonStrengths are helpful to a point. My strengths were entirely strategic thinking and interpersonal skills, which is good to know. It’s also good to know that I don’t have a single executive leadership strength. The actual reports from Gallup about one’s strengths are very helpful because they generate potential career options and ways that one should market oneself. I feel like I had no concept of how to do that until very recently. It’s also nice to have words and reports to back up what you’re saying in an interview, so you don’t feel like you’re overselling yourself or giving a biased report of your own ability.

I’ve heard that students sometimes treat their results as binding identifiers, rather than as tools for self-knowledge and improvement. Is that kind of thinking common?

I certainly think it’s common. It seems like a locus of control kind of thing—all of the circumstances around me, all my natural strengths, dictate that I should go here and do this. I should never compensate. But actually, you can change and improve. You should look at your weaknesses. I think that can differ from student to student, but I think that is certainly a pitfall of CliftonStrengths. The idea that you should never go for any leadership positions because the test didn’t assign you any leadership strengths isn’t necessarily true. You just might not be as naturally able to lead as others.

What do you want to see Pathways incorporate more of?

In my own personal experience, I’d like more alumni engagement. We were required to do an informational interview with an alum, and that was great. But there are so many Furman alumni that love Furman and want to pour into students, and I think it would be great if students were pushed to interact with them more.

I also think certain things like writing cover letters and resumes, no matter how much you try and tune that stuff out, is really important. It also gives workers at The Malone Center or The Cothran Center a bit of a break, if you can build a foundation in students early. Instead of starting from scratch junior year, they’ll have drafts they want to cater. Your career can take so much time, and it’s just hard to nail all that down. So I think any emphasis on pre-professional prep could only benefit students.

Do you have any sense of the survey and data-acquisition methods that the university uses to gauge student opinion about Pathways?

I believe that most of it comes from “snap evaluations” at the end of each Pathway session. Students aren’t allowed to leave until they do the survey. It’s usually three required questions and then two optional, free-response questions. Things like “Did you learn anything?” “What went well, what didn’t go well?” Usually students leave the free-response blank and just do the three required ones as quickly as possible. And that’s just not sound data collection. At least for the Gallup surveys [which is another way the university evaluates the program], students are positively incentivised. They push those surveys really hard, and a lot of students do them. I think the data collection should just be more comprehensive. The snap evaluation method is really bad. It’s hard to trust answers that were demanded in exchange for leaving during your lunch block.

How would you rate Pathways’s academic rigor?

It varies so much from instructor to instructor. I had an instructor who was really awesome and very much cared about Pathways and the students. That made it much a better experience. I hated the assignments and didn’t see the point of them, but I still did them and tried to do them well because I really loved my instructor, and I knew that she would be disappointed if I didn’t. So that can change a lot. But the rigor is nothing crazy. It’s mostly free responses, and how much you have to write varies. I know people who wrote bullet points instead of full sentences, and they still got 100s. I think that’s a problem.

Do you agree with the claim that Pathways is necessary to level the playing field for Furman students who are disadvantaged in one way or another?

I think it’s true that there are a number of Furman students that don’t get the Furman experience, whatever that may be—internships, study away, great student involvement, etc. I think student involvement revolves around the same kind of types of students, as sad as that is. The people getting the full Furman experience tend to be the same as the ones doing study away getting internships, and those are also the same folks that are club presidents and student leadership.

It’s really hard to say what causes that. I think Pathways attempts to make the full Furman experience available and push students towards it. But also, I think for some students it’s an effort issue. For other students I think it’s truly external, like in the case of an international student. I think Pathways is beneficial for them. But I also think, at the end of the day, students themselves have to put in a lot of effort, and that just doesn’t always happen.

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Stay tuned! We will publish another perspective from a Furman community member periodically through the coming weeks!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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Dear Elizabeth,

Furman shines at this time of year. Many websites remind us that the school “is praised for its natural beauty” and that “the aesthetic appeal of the campus is a significant factor in students feeling at home and engaged.” Very true. Now, just a month before graduation, we wish you and the Class of ’26 all the best.

In our latest Belltower Times, we returned to the issue of viewpoint diversity, suggesting Furman join forces with a credible outside firm to obtain some solid data on the issue, for example, if faculty political leanings impact such things as teaching and hiring and promotion.

Viewpoint diversity is one of three factors in fostering a campus of open inquiry along with protection of free speech and robust and constructive disagreement. It is also foundational. Protecting free speech and modeling respectful dialogue are not difficult on a campus where everyone holds generally the same opinions. But that is also a campus that does not fulfill the purpose of a university where the search for knowledge requires viewpoint diversity.

It’s justified to worry that viewpoint diversity might be more difficult to achieve on a campus where an overwhelming majority of faculty lean left, as is pretty much the situation at most universities. But the corrective is not affirmative action for conservatives.

Instead, Furman could start by examining whether its faculty’s homogeneous political outlook stands in the way of it fulfilling the core purposes of the university.

In 2002, David Horowitz published the compelling “Academic Bill of Rights,” an early discussion of the problem of viewpoint diversity, which he termed intellectual pluralism. Here he notes one test for how faculty should act to ensure intellectual pluralism:

Faculty should avoid “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.”

There is no need to go into the controversy generated by Horowitz’s Bill of Rights, but the above seems self-evident. Faculty, on the left, right, or center must have integrity and act with humility. “Academic freedom is not the same as free speech”, notes John Tomasi. “Everyone has the right as a citizen to express their views freely in the public square. But a classroom is not a public square. It is a place of learning, and that means that professors are obligated to behave professionally, as teachers, and not to use their classrooms as platforms for political causes.”

But doesn’t the burden of proof of professional behavior lie squarely with the left-leaning faculty? When the data show that nearly 98% of Furman faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes, it’s the faculty that should respond. They should either dispute the data or demonstrate that their political contributions and political leanings are irrelevant to their work.

The FFSA is willing to sponsor that discussion. We could begin with the incident I often mention, the mobbing of Peter Paluszak, who was engaged in an officially authorized pro-life demonstration. (This deplorable incident is covered in full here.) Some Furman faculty let students out of class so they could join a crowd in front of the library to mob, taunt, and bully Peter. It seems to me that such unprofessional behavior by faculty requires disciplinary action.

As Furman President you have insisted on the importance of free speech and open dialogue, attention also needs to be paid to how the faculty encourages or suppresses viewpoint diversity. If your faculty insists that free speech means they can use their classrooms as bully pulpits, let them come forward and make that argument. At the very least, it would be good to find out if such activity is the norm at Furman or an anomaly.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Salmon
President,
Furman Free Speech Alliance

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• 👏 FFSA is hosting a live webinar with Alumni Free Speech Alliance’s Tom Neale later this month on our Substack. Paid subscribers get to ask questions first - so upgrade your membership today and stay tuned for more details!

• 🏀 Congratulations to the Furman Paladins on their hard-fought first-round NCAA Tournament battle against the UConn Huskies — who lost to Michigan in the National Championship game last night. Go Dins!

• 🎉 Dins Day, Furman’s annual 24-hour alumni giving celebration, is coming up on April 25. We are not officially affiliated with the university, but there is no one in the Furman community advocating harder for free speech than us! If you’d like to support that, consider becoming a paid FFSA subscriber today or donating here.

Furman Trivia:

With Furman’s basketball team making another NCAA Tournament appearance this year, let’s test your Paladin hoops knowledge. Which Paladin hit the buzzer-beater to stun #4 Virginia in the 2023 NCAA Tournament?

• A) Mike Bothwell

• B) Garrett Hien

• C) Jalen Slawson

• D) JP Pegues

*Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!*

Does Furman Have a Viewpoint Diversity Problem?

On March 30, our colleagues at Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD) published a striking finding: at Davidson College, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 15 to 1 among faculty. Moreover, all of the Republicans are concentrated into only 6 departments in the hard sciences and social sciences. All the other departments — including all of the humanities — do not employ “a single Republican.”

The Davidson study is just the latest in a growing body of evidence documenting a lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses across the country. The free speech movement has spent decades securing formal protections for open inquiry and expression. Now, it is grappling with whether the intellectual conditions for such inquiry actually exist on today’s campuses. Too often, the answer is unfortunately not.

The problem with this lack of viewpoint diversity is that it leads to the complete exclusion of some perspectives across entire disciplines. The result, as Heterodox Academy has documented, is a university where the range of ideas students encounter is quietly narrowed by the ideological composition of the faculty itself.

The question for Furman is simple: is our university really an exception to this national trend?

The evidence suggests it is not.

We can’t run the same analysis as Davidson. Unlike North Carolina, South Carolina doesn’t have partisan voter registration — meaning there’s no public record of which party Furman faculty belong to.

But the data we do have suggests we would see similar results.

According to City Journal’s 2025 College Rankings, nearly 98% of Furman faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes. And as Kevin Wallsten — the political scientist behind the rankings — explained in an exclusive interview with FFSA last month, campaign donations are among the most reliable proxies for faculty ideology available.

This lack of viewpoint diversity should matter to Furman, and especially to President Elizabeth Davis. She has made it a central goal of her administration to help Furman students “engage thoughtfully across difference.” That’s impossible when those differences simply don’t exist at a relevant level.

So, what should Furman do? There’s no magic recipe. Increasing faculty viewpoint diversity is going to be difficult. But the first step is simple enough. We need to assess the reality on the ground and get better data on the viewpoint diversity of Furman’s faculty.

That’s why we are calling on President Davis to commission an independent assessment of faculty viewpoint diversity on campus — working with a credible outside organization like FIRE or Heterodox Academy, both of which have developed rigorous tools for exactly this purpose.

Such an assessment would be a valuable service to students, alumni, parents, and faculty alike. Right now, Furman's community is left to draw conclusions from secondhand data. A rigorous, independent assessment is the easiest way to fix that. Then, from that honest starting point, the university can build a real strategy.

CLPs of the Month:

Furman students must attend 32 Cultural Life Programs (CLPs) to graduate. CLPs are university-approved events meant to “enrich” and “build community.”

Here are some interesting CLPs coming up in April:

• On Wednesday, April 8, the Women’s and Gender Studies department hosts “Data Feminism in Action,” a lecture arguing for a movement of “epistemic disobedience” against the “reigning logics of AI and data science.”

• On Wednesday, April 15, Furman Theatre presents “HumanKind: be both,” a dance production described as “a celebration of stories untold” that highlights the “beauty of diverse narratives.” Runs April 15–19.

• On Wednesday, April 29, the Furman Pride Alliance hosts the “Spring 2026 Drag Show” — featuring professional and student drag performers.

Trivia Answer:

D) JP Pegues — the sophomore drained a 3-pointer with just 2.2 seconds left to give Furman a stunning 68-67 victory, the program’s first NCAA Tournament win since 1974.

This week, we bring you the perspective of Nathan Johnson, a junior Politics and History major.

Johnson reflects on where he thinks Pathways falls short, arguing that the program functions as a safety net for unmotivated students while not serving the majority of the student body. For reform, he suggests shortening the program to two semesters and focusing more on career-related skills rather than personal values and vocation.

Read Johnson’s full interview below.

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What was your experience in Pathways? Did it benefit you?

I think the first month or two was beneficial in that it forced me to get around campus. There was an assignment where I had to take a picture at a bunch of different buildings to prove I knew where they were. It helped me to get oriented, which was really great. But beyond that, I didn’t benefit much. It just felt kind of useless. I didn’t hate it, I just didn’t really see why I had to do it. I think a big benefit of a freshman seminar of any sort, educationally speaking, is having a cohort of students that you go through life and classes with, but there’s no really communal aspect to Pathways.

In terms of the information that they give you, it seems like they’re trying to tell you how to be a good person, and you can’t really teach someone how to do that in a class. There’s a lot of stuff about discovering your vocation and having respectful conversations, which just aren’t going to be taught in a decentralized curriculum once a week.

I can see how some students would benefit from Pathways, but we’re probably talking about the bottom quintile. Making a LinkedIn or a resume are things that most students will figure out how to do by the time that they need to do them. Pathways just functions as a safety net for the students that wouldn’t be motivated to figure things out themselves. Then all the other students are forced to do the same program, because the students that aren’t motivated to learn those skills aren’t going to be the ones to volunteer for a remedial life-practices course.

Do you know any students who view Pathways positively?

No, I do not. I don’t know any students that like it, and I haven’t talked to any peer mentors that seem to believe in it either. The peer mentors tend to like it because it pays well, and some think they might be able to make it better. I can’t say with certainty that no students enjoy it, but I’ve yet to encounter a student or a peer mentor that does.

Does Pathways have positive components?

Having to interview someone with a career I was interested in was really good. Being forced to give a speech about something in my personal life with my classmates was good practice. All of these are things which should be done earlier in the curriculum though. We did the speech on the last day of my class, and until then, I had not been close with a single other person or really talked with anyone in my class; after that, we all had things to talk about with each other and felt more companionship and common ground.

I will also say, one benefit of Clifton Strengths [a sort of personality test] is that they give you a structure and vocabulary for explaining your strengths and weaknesses in job interviews, though obviously not using the words that they give you. But if you read the description and reword it, that can help in articulating soft skills.

How could Furman make Pathways more substantial?

One thing they could do would be to lean more into the sorts of things they do at the beginning—generally orienting students to campus and introducing freshmen to the resources available to them. Then I would recommend gutting a lot of the personal values and vocation stuff, because I’ve yet to meet someone who has really benefited from those practices. I would also want to see a shift into how to do classes and academics, in addition to preparation for job and career.

I also think a lot of the things they do sophomore year should be done freshman year. You don’t need to wait till you’re a sophomore to talk to someone about a career or to put together a resume and LinkedIn. A lot of freshmen apply to internships for the summer, so why not cover those things sooner? Also learning how to comport yourself and brand yourself for an interview. Those seem like things aren’t going to come up necessarily in required academic classes, but they’re still good things to know how to do pretty early on. That’s why I think a two semester program, instead of a two year program, would be appropriate.

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Stay tuned! We will publish another perspective from a Furman community member every other Wednesday!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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In the 2025 rankings, Furman earned high marks for student experience. But the university struggles on outcomes: Furman ranks 89th out of 100 on the Price to Earnings premium, meaning students take longer than peers at comparable schools to pay back the cost of their education. Wallsten also flagged concerns about curriculum requirements and DEI mandates. Most strikingly, nearly 98% of faculty campaign donations in the 2023-2024 election cycle went to liberal of Democratic causes. Wallsten argues this reflects a faculty culture with little room for minority viewpoints.

Read the full interview below:

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🎓 Tell me about yourself and your role with the Manhattan Institute.

I’m a professor of political science. I have worked and published academically on questions connected to American politics. By training, I’m a survey researcher, so I teach a lot of courses on methods and measurement, but also on broader social-science questions. I’ve been working on higher education for four or five years, including campus speech-climate and viewpoint-diversity issues. I’ve also done projects investigating DEI in both higher education and in the military.

Right around 2020 or 2021—peak woke, if you will—I was already active in exploring some of these questions. Being a social scientist who’s primarily quantitative and empirical, my goal was always to, to the extent possible, measure what was going on; to figure out the size of these commitments to DEI and what measurable impacts they were having on student experience and free speech. Through that work I started partnering with The Manhattan Institute, and we started formulating an ambitious plan to think about college rankings in a different way.

🏆 Why did you set out to create a new college ranking system?

I think everybody is familiar with the U.S. News & World Report as the preeminent college-rankings approach. There have been some others recently that I think are useful additions to this space. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, started a college ranking a few years ago. Forbes Magazine, Washington Monthly, and of course, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) all have rankings as well. Each ranking is imperfect in a variety of ways, yet they’re incredibly influential with both prospective students and the administrators who run universities. There’s an old joke that the U.S. News & World Report is actually governing our universities because administrators pay so much attention to their preferences.

And yet, for all the attention these rankings get, some are seriously deficient. U.S. News & World Report is really a reputational ranking. They take into account things like admissions rate, SAT scores, etc. None of that tells you what life will be like when you show up on campus, or how you’re going to end up afterwards.

Forbes, Washington Monthly and The Wall Street Journal have all realized this, and they’ve started doing more outcomes-based rankings. They’re really trying to get at the difference in impact on a student’s long-term career prospects depending on the school they attend. But even this is deficient because we have this black box of what the educational experience itself is like that we’re not able to peer into. All of this happened at the same time that a lot of craziness unfolded on university campuses, and people began thinking, “how is it that Princeton or Harvard’s ranking has not budged in 25 years in the U.S. News & World Report?”

That’s why we had this idea that prospective students would be better served with a ranking system that tried to evaluate what’s going on in the classroom with other students and with the faculty. We hoped that by shining a light on these things, especially in a quantitative, measurable, transparent way, universities could begin to critically examine the kinds of decisions they’re making as institutions and consider reforming themselves.

🛠️ Would you explain the rankings’ methodology?

The first thing we wanted to do is acknowledge that outcomes matter. This is not a purely ideological or political project where we’re pretending that whether you get a job at the end is unimportant. We also don’t want to say that the usual metrics are telling you nothing about universities, because they obviously are. And while we think FIRE’s method of focusing only on free speech is valuable, we didn’t want to only focus on one dimension. We wanted to take the work others had already done, and put it alongside other things that have received less attention.

To capture outcomes of education, we looked at graduation rate, retention rate, and graduate median income earning. We wanted to look at how long it takes students to pay back the cost of their education and whether they will have a solid alumni network. Our methodology for this was very close to what The Wall Street Journal does. We created a model that says, “Here’s what a student is predicted to earn based on the SAT scores of the incoming class, and here’s how much they actually do earn.” The difference is considered the impact of education. We do that with graduation rates as well.

Then we started thinking carefully about what else we need to be holistic and capture the whole college experience. We came up with three other broad buckets that we think have received insufficient attention in previous rankings. Those are educational experience, which includes curricular quality; leadership quality, which asks what direction the president and administration are pointing the school in; and, of course, the student experience, looking at how much of a school’s community involvement is benign or beneficial versus malign. We think it’s important, for instance, that there be a lively sports culture, lively Greek life, and dense organizational environment on campus.

To measure this, we developed a lot of in-house measures. We conducted a census of student organizations by scraping every university’s website and figuring out how many organizations there are, and then we classified them. How many are religious or spiritual? How many are academic? How many are political? Within the political category, how many are left-wing organizations and how many are right-wing?

In many other cases, we took work that had already been done in a piecemeal fashion by other organizations. There’s an organization called ACTA which conducts the What Will They Learn? rankings. It’s a very sophisticated and detailed study of general education requirements. We also used FIRE’s reports on campus speech policies and a lot of their survey data. We took work from organizations like Speech First that have measured the presence of bias reporting systems and DEI mandates on campus.

💬 What kind of feedback did you get?

I am a parent, so I have a lot of people in my network who are very interested in this work that I hear positive things from. The really surprising thing is the extent to which the project has found an audience with university presidents, deans, and faculty members. That’s been the most encouraging part. So I would say it’s served its dual purpose. We wanted the rankings to reach an audience among both of those camps, and as far as I can tell, they have.

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🏛️ Why do you think administrators and faculty are so keen on the rankings?

Universities realize that they face a converging set of challenges from an enrollment perspective. First is the demographic cliff: the inevitable decline in college attendance that’s driven by the fact there will be fewer people who are of college age coming through the system because of the declining birth rate. The second part, of course, is declining trust in higher education, which is driving potential students—particularly young men and young conservatives—away from universities. I have a piece I published on this in City Journal. The numbers are really shocking.

On the trust front—I think public discourse around universities can fall victim to two problems. The first is, if you don’t follow these things carefully, you think every school is Harvard, in the sense that Harvard receives a vastly disproportionate amount of attention in the news. We wanted our rankings to alert people to the fact that not all colleges and universities are Harvard. There are some schools out there that are still providing a nice return on investment that aren’t plagued by all of the craziness that you see reported in The New York Times.

The second problem is this idea that universities are monolithic and that everybody in the university is aligned with the worst professor that you see at a protest or an encampment. In fact, there are reformers in every university. There are people who do not agree with the direction of the institution. You can find them in the bureaucracy. You can find them in the faculty. You can find them everywhere. Our rankings were designed to empower those reformers within the university by giving them the context and hard numbers they need to fight back on any given question. And I think that has been successful.

⚖️ Some have criticized your rankings for failing to articulate a unified pedagogical theory, and consider your grading of institutions according to particular conceptions of political and cultural virtue problematic. How do you respond to that?

Any rankings necessarily require making value judgments. That’s just true whether you’re ranking the greatest bands of all time, the greatest NBA players, or which universities are the best. That critique is fair enough in the sense that it is true—we have things we prioritize, value, and think are important, but so does every other ranking system, either implicitly or explicitly. What we tried to do is be very transparent about that and provide the weights we employ in our overall assessment of universities. You can disagree with that; ask “why is this thing 2% and that thing 5%?” And our response is, yeah, we do have priorities as an institution.

In setting up the website design, it was very important to me that people would be able to search by sub-category for precisely this reason. If someone thinks we’re giving too much weight to this or that, they can use the filtering tool and sort through our rankings in that way. I joke that if someone doesn’t like the way the rankings reward schools with less DEI infrastructure, all they have to do is click on “Commitment to Meritocracy,” and rather than search from the top of the list down, scroll to the bottom, find the most DEI-committed university in the country, and just send their kids there.

So the first response is, yes the rankings have an ideological slant, but we are transparent about that. If you don’t like our priorities, then you can take our rankings with the appropriate dose of salt, but we’re not hiding anything. My second response is, compared to what? You can quibble with our methodology, but as we talked about at the start, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Monthly, provide zero insight into many of the things that we’re trying to capture. I think skeptics should ask, “Is the average parent or prospective student better or worse off with the information that we provide?” I would argue that they’re far better off.

🔍 Your rankings cover 100 universities. How did you choose that group?

There’s a practical argument here as well as a substantive one. This is our first iteration, and we weren’t quite sure how it was all going to turn out. And, as I said, it’s a serious undertaking in terms of collecting data that nobody’s collected before. If you’re going to do a census of every student organization on every campus, that becomes really labor intensive really quickly. Plus, 100 is a nice round number.

We also wanted to identify the schools that we think people care most about. Regional schools are important—a lot of people attend them and there’s very important things happening on those campuses—but to start, we wanted to identify those high-profile campuses that come right to the top of people’s minds. So we tried to take all the schools that appear in the top 100 of the traditional rankings. We have the Ivys, we have large state flagship universities from most of the states, and some representation for liberal-arts colleges as well, which we thought were important. It’s not a comprehensive list, but we wanted to make sure that the high-profile universities that are important within a region or nationally would be represented in our data.

⭐ Why was Furman ranked 50th?

What Furman does well—though I don’t know if Furman the institution deserves credit for it necessarily—is the quality of what we call the “student experience.” Furman scores very, very highly in student ideological pluralism. Furman also does very well on student organizational balance. These indicators are important for students who want to go to a school where there’s ideological balance in the classroom, meaning there is likely to be a place where they’ll feel comfortable within their peer group on campus.

We would encourage Furman to highlight this aspect of their campus life. It’s a place that is ideologically very moderate and you can see that reflected in how students feel. To continue with what Furman does well, we have a measure of what we call “Jewish campus climate.” This was an issue that was very much consuming people’s attention when we were putting the rankings together. There were prominent encampments and a lot of instances of anti-Semitism unfolding on campuses. Furman has proved largely immune from those trends in higher education over the last two years, and we think it deserves credit for that.

We also think that, all things being equal, universities that have strong ROTC programs just provide a different educational environment. Furman does very well on this as well. So for student experience, we have Furman right near the top. If I were a prospective student, and I cared a lot about student experience, this is something I would look at and take very seriously.

Furman is performing poorly on the “outcomes” end of things. As I mentioned earlier, we have a model that’s very similar to what The Wall Street Journal does. But we also take into account the caliber of the student coming in, and assess whether the school overperforms or underperforms what we would anticipate given that quality of student. Furman doesn’t do very well here. There’s also a measure that’s put together by the organization Third Way called the Price to Earnings Premium. This is, I think, a really helpful way for prospective students to think about their education, and it puts a number to how long it will take to pay back the cost of an education. We think that’s a good measure, and unfortunately, Furman performs very poorly. They’re 89 out of our 100 Schools.

📈 If Furman wanted to advance, what specific improvements could it make?

It can be a little bit challenging from a university’s perspective to figure out what to do. I think the good news for Furman is there are some easy steps for improvement. Furman could sign on to institutional neutrality, for example, which is the idea that institutions themselves should not give opinions on or mobilize on behalf of certain causes. An institution should be home to critics, but not a critic itself. This is something universities have broadly run afoul of a lot in recent years.

Another area for improvement is curricular requirements. This is not so much about what is being taught in the class as what kinds of classes the university is requiring everyone to take as part of their general education. One of the things that jumped out about Furman is that they do not require a U.S. government or history course in order to graduate. Furman could improve its rank by really bulking up some of those general-education requirements, particularly in the American government/history area. A related improvement would be eliminating the DEI requirement. We would argue that Furman’s students would be better served by eliminating the DEI requirement and replacing it with a more traditional course (such as U.S. history or civics).

The last thing I’ll mention is the faculty. Our particular measure tries to assess how heterodox the faculty are. Broadly, that’s going to mean looking for ideological diversity. There are a couple of good faculty-based associations that allow faculty members to join and participate. The two that are most prominent are the Academic Freedom Alliance and Heterodox Academy. Our measure looked at how many faculty per capita are members of these organizations, because we think it reveals something about how faculty think about their jobs and the kinds of things they’re bringing to the classroom. This was an area where Furman didn’t perform exceptionally well, and we would encourage faculty members to join these organizations for a different perspective on what’s going on in higher education.

📊 When FFSA has pointed out that Furman’s faculty is not very ideologically diverse, we’ve received some pushback from faculty and staff. Your rankings claim that “nearly 98 percent of faculty campaign donations in the 2023–24 election cycle went to liberal or Democratic causes.” Why are campaign donations a viable metric for discerning ideological pluralism?

This is the area of debate in higher education that’s soaking up the most attention at the moment. The truth is, there is no good data set of what faculty believe across a large number of campuses. It just doesn’t exist. There have been attempts to measure faculty political attitudes through surveys, but these are plagued by all sorts of problems. There have been some attempts to look at party registration, but that’s only available in roughly half of the states.

Our attempt is to use campaign donations as a proxy for where the faculty sit politically. We would argue that’s the most comparable measure across universities. It’s also usually pretty clear, in that if somebody gives to a Democratic candidate instead of a Republican candidate, that signals a political preference. We like that there’s no ambiguity there. We also see variation across campuses of the kind you would expect. Hillsdale looks very different from Columbia.

Also, FIRE did a survey of college students in which they asked where the average faculty member is on the left to right continuum. They’re asking students for their perception of where the faculty is ideologically, and this turns out to be highly correlated with faculty campaign contributions. So we’re capturing the same results using student perception, which tends to be fairly accurate.

There are a couple things I would say about the viewpoint diversity of the faculty, though. No university is monolithic. There’s always going to be diversity of opinion in some way on a campus.

Universities need to not ostracize conservative faculty members, but instead promote their work and highlight them. Liberal faculty can cultivate diversity by acknowledging the work of their conservative colleagues. I think too often, universities shy away from promoting their conservative faculty members because they’re not well aligned with the dominant trend of faculty opinion.

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This week, we focus on the perspective of Dr. Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion and former Pathways Advisor.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

In the beginning I did not pay much attention to Pathways. The program’s earliest iterations were voluntary and designed for students who desired some extra help in adjusting to college. I took more notice when the vision expanded to requiring a two-year course that would receive one academic credit each semester, especially when the program’s main focus after the first few weeks of college-adjustment modules seemed to be preparing students for the job market.

Don’t get me wrong—I believe we really did need to increase what we were doing to prepare students for the workplace. We also needed to help students be more aware of and make better use of the resources we already had on campus. Doing these things better was important for our current students and for recruiting new students, especially in a world where college value is identified with a quantifiable return on investment.

But when job preparation seemed to be the primary focus of the course—and as Pathways increasingly appeared to be advertised as our signature program—I wanted to know more. That was when I decided to teach Pathways.

What did you learn from that experience?

First, let me say that I have always enjoyed advising new students, and I did that for over 35 years. I think having faculty or a staff person meet with new students regularly, especially in the first semester, is a great idea. I think it was helpful to students, and I loved the opportunity to get to know them. I was able to help with significant bumps in the road that some of them encountered.

As time went on, however, I felt there were too many meetings given the content we were working with. I also was concerned about the legitimacy of giving academic credit for the experience. Students were assigned nothing of any significance to read or do to prepare for the classes. Understandably, there was concern about Pathways work detracting from the students’ regular classes, and technically the one credit does give them an overload. I do get that concern about maintaining balance, but assigning no real academic work for a course receiving academic credit was, and is, a concern for me. I keep thinking about the elective course in Religion (or in another department) that seniors often find meaningful and now won’t be taking because Pathways credits provide the equivalent of a full course.

How would you suggest changing Pathways to be more robust?

In the first semester, I would like to see very short, quality readings that would help students understand what it means to be a college student. There are some good, brief, well-researched and interesting pieces by experts on study skills, notetaking, and the like that could lead to good conversations. There are also some wonderful op-eds that address the value of learning. Having such short readings as a starting point would give students experience in how to engage in discussion without requiring them to talk about their personal experiences, which is difficult for a small group of students who do not know each other early on.

After a few sessions that include not only the basics of college life at Furman but also the tools needed for advanced learning (learning management systems, electronic library usage, the use of AI, etc.), Pathways could move toward helping students learn the meaning of a liberal arts education. Initially, we need to put aside the assumption that students need only to reflect on their self-understanding in order to find their “right” major and their own pathway.

Students need to broaden the horizons they developed in high school. That should begin with a better understanding of what it might mean to be broadly educated and how the various disciplinary methodologies open up new worlds—and pathways—for all of us. This cannot be done by reading a single article about a liberal arts education, but short academic pieces, podcasts, and op-eds could kindle discussions about the work of different disciplines. One way to do this would be to consider the nature of memory and story as these are studied and utilized in different academic fields. Attention to what science and social sciences are telling us about how we make and retain memories—and why some things are forgotten and some things are remembered—could be a good introduction to these methodologies.

From there, a look at how historians, writers of literature, politicians, religious teachers, educators, and communicators of all kinds tell stories could spark meaningful conversation among students about the nature of different disciplines. These discussions might also help students understand themselves. How and why do we tell our personal story, our university’s story, our company’s story, the story of our research, and all the other stories that form our lives? Discussing these ideas in a basic way will prepare students to understand the General Education Requirements (GERs) not as mere hoops to jump through but as important ways to understand the world, which is what GERs at Furman were designed to do.

Were there particular things in the first year that concerned you?

The main module that concerned me addressed issues of identity and included an exercise which I chose not to do with my class, partly because my students were very hesitant to talk about personal subjects. I will note that this exercise has been removed. Pathways’s designers have provided opportunities for instructor feedback, though that particular change was not the result of my direct feedback. I do think we need more input from more faculty, and I’m happy to say that our faculty governance is currently providing more opportunity for that.

Aside from that exercise, I did not find the topics problematic in themselves. I think, for example, the class that deals with how to have conversation across difference fits well with the new “On Discourse” program, though such an exercise might be improved by beginning with a good short article that focused on academic studies of something like the value of kindness.

But my biggest concern about the program is the perspective on values that I believe the program is unintentionally projecting. And here I am not referring to any political or social system that we hear about in the daily news.

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What are the values that concern you?

I fear that the main values students absorb through the Pathways Program is job preparedness and career success. While I do not think the creators of Pathways intend that, and there are other values presented, I think they are drowned out by our larger culture. Even at places like Harvard—partly because A’s are so common—students feel that they can distinguish themselves in the job market only by spending more time on extracurricular activities like internships; the result is less concern for the courses they take.

The second year of Pathways, which consists of career shadowing, writing resumes, and internships, becomes the Furman Pathway to that big goal: the job. Those things are and should be very exciting; there is nothing wrong with wanting a good job. But there are some shortcomings that come from making that vision central.

I fear that the job preparedness focus of Pathways could encourage students to engage too much in the branding mentality that makes us all entrepreneurs of ourselves. Certainly young people need to practice identifying and developing their strengths, but I think we also need to do more to help students see the value in community and civic responsibility.

You mentioned that Pathways does teach other values. What are some examples?

The current program has a couple of short modules explicitly addressing values. Early on, students are asked to choose their values from words on a stack of cards that includes everything from faith to fashion. Another exercise asks them to think about what kind of job they want—one that pays a lot but requires many hours of work away from home, a job that pays less but allows more freedom, or something in between. Certainly important questions, but I think it is a very meager beginning. Pathways should encourage students to consider a wider list of values beyond “self-care,” which is included as an important part of the program and the path to a good job.

Students take the Clifton Strengths test, which provides positive statements of what it describes as talents and ways of engaging with the world. Everyone enjoys getting their results, and thinking and talking about them can be a positive and inspiring experience. Despite that, it bothers me to see the strengths so often listed in students’ email signature line. Even if these tests provide a scientifically credible understanding of our strengths, which many question, I think it is the task of a university like Furman to more explicitly encourage students to find other ways to define themselves—things like character and their appreciation of the world as seekers of knowledge and persons who seek to develop new strengths.

If Pathways is to be the center of Furman’s branding and recruiting message, then it should encourage students to consider more explicitly “what really matters,” historically an important part of Furman’s traditional ethos. Yes, jobs matter a lot. But most of us know that a job alone will not make us happy—much less help us know how to live a meaningful life not only in times of joy and success but also in times of sorrow or failure. Everyone has values, things that they care about, but students need not only to identify them but also to appraise them. A worthwhile first-year experience should challenge students to begin to move beyond identifying values to cultivating character, an educational journey more important than even a job.

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Stay tuned! Moving forward, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member every other Wednesday!

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

This week, we focus on the perspective of Dr. Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost; Professor of Psychology

We hope you enjoy the insight.

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Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman.

I have been at Furman since 2001 when I started on faculty in psychology. I was the department chair from 2013 to 2017. During that time I had the opportunity to participate in a resiliency study that was conducted across the four Duke Endowment campuses (Furman, Duke, Davidson, and Johnson C. Smith). That study in many ways launched me on the trajectory of being in administration and also connects to both Pathways and The Furman Advantage (which I’ll come back to later).

From 2017 to 2022 I was the Associate Provost for Engaged Learning. Then, when our provost went back to the faculty, I took the interim role for two years, and am now in my second year in the official role. Furman was my first job out of my PhD at University of Florida—I’ve been here my entire career, and that’s intentional. I really believe in and am very passionate about what we do. I believe in the mission, and I want to help continue to move that mission forward.

Can you give me an overview of The Furman Advantage?

When Elizabeth Davis arrived at Furman and took stock of the school, she quickly identified our many strengths, including our rigorous academics, faculty engagement, undergraduate research, student internships, and robust study-away program. She observed the powerful connections between faculty and students.

At the same time, she also noticed that not all students were having the same experience. There were some that, for whatever reason, were not getting the transformative experience that we really wanted for all of our students. So that’s where The Furman Advantage started and why it was so successful. It spoke to and leveraged the things that we were already really good at, and tried to make good on the every-student promise; to figure out how to get all students engaged at that level.

Another area where students told us we could improve—a finding repeated in our own internal assessment and eventually through a Gallup assessment—was first year advising. Students also said we needed to do more by way of professional development, especially for graduates looking to get jobs rather than advanced degrees after Furman. We needed to figure out how to both improve our advising and mentoring and do a better job of preparing students for life after Furman.

Underlying a lot of that was the question, “How do we get students to reflect more?” We know we have a student body that’s very motivated and very high achieving. They go and go and go, but they don’t always stop and reflect on what they’re doing and perhaps be more intentional about the choices they’re making. Figuring out how to do that was another piece of the puzzle. The resiliency study also showed that our students were experiencing a lot of academic stress. We needed a way to intervene and support students with time-management and study skills.

When we were first launching The Furman Advantage, we needed to know what the barriers to the full Furman experience were. The primary one, of course, was financial. If we really wanted students to do full-time summer experiences, whether research or internships, we needed to make those opportunities available to all students, not just the ones who could afford to not get paid in the summer. The other thing that was really loud and clear was that students would often say, “I just figured all this out way too late. I didn’t have the right advising and support.” So it was an information, access, preparation, and scaffolding question. That’s where Pathways really started to take form.

Tell me more about Pathways.

Pathways was designed to make sure that we are providing people with the information and basic skills, like creating a resume or sitting through an interview, that students need to be professionally equipped. Back in 2016 or ‘17 there were different committees working to launch all the pieces of The Furman Advantage. They were thinking about engaged learning and about advising over the course of a four year pathway. The committees independently came to the conclusion that Furman needed to do something differently in years one and two.

By the fall of 2017 we were ready to execute on a pilot program. We soft-launched the Pathways Program for what was supposed to be five-ish years. Covid happened in the middle of that, so it got extended. Each year we took a sample of about 120 incoming freshmen and randomly assigned them into cohorts. We also had a comparison group of non-Pathways students and would assess both on the outcomes that we were looking for: Are students taking advantage of more engaged learning? Are they reporting positive advising experiences? Are they learning to reflect? These are the kinds of outcomes we were hoping for, and we could actually compare the treatment group and the control group.

I will tell you that that type of assessment is very rare in higher education. It was a quasi-experiment that had random group assignment (in that incoming students were randomly selected to participate in the pilot or comparison group). And the data from the pilot was compelling! We saw an increased sense of belonging in the Pathways group, along with more satisfaction with advising. There was definitely more early connection with the Career Center. In the end—which is right now—we’re actually showing better retention.

In order for the Pathways Program to become part of the curriculum and a graduation requirement, it had to go through the faculty for an official vote. We went through that process, presented the data that we had collected over the years, and got it approved by the faculty with the caveat that at year six, which will be next year, it would come back up for a vote. We’ve continued to do a lot of assessments, including the same ones we did during the soft launch. The difference now is we’re really looking at correlation over time. For example, sense of belonging seems to have continued to increase over time. Is that due to Pathways? Not necessarily. But I think the combination of that pilot data and the current data gives us confidence that Pathways is certainly playing a role.

Were the original pilot groups self-selecting?

No. We contacted 150 incoming students and said “you’ve been selected for this program.” Now, did all of them agree to do it? Not necessarily. Some people dropped out. Some said the time commitment was too much, some said they didn’t need the program, and then some left Furman, so there’s not much you can do there. But yes, they were random. Imagine it this way: we take 600 incoming students, pull out 150 names, randomly put them into cohorts, and then pull out the students from the remaining 450 that best matched the Pathways population for the comparison.

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What kind of assessments do you conduct now?

Our assessments now are fairly robust. The students provide feedback through “snap evaluations” after each module or course. They also complete course evaluations at the end of each semester like they would for any Furman course. What will be interesting now is that our current seniors are the first class to go all the way through the program. It will be really useful to get their mature reflections on the program, since, as is often the case, you can look back and understand some of the things you had to do as a student better than you did at the time. I think we’re probably going to see some of that in our feedback.

We’re also still working with Gallup. Gallup assesses our students and employees once a year, and our alumni every five years. So that’s another big basis for some of our evaluation of Pathways. We also do an assessment (The National Survey of Student Engagement) every three years that looks at things like mentoring, access to high-impact practices, etc. We also create a Pathways Report every year.

We do these sorts of evaluations because we urgently want The Furman Advantage to be successful and to actually live up to our guarantees. Our assessments initially showed us that we were going to have to provide a bit more scaffolding on the front end. When we looked at what our barriers were we saw that this was an opportunity. Students were saying that freshmen advising was kind of luck of the draw—whether they got a good advisor or not. We’re hopeful that Pathways will solve some of that, because the training that’s involved with being a Pathways advisor is pretty heavy in terms of understanding the curriculum, learning how to interact with students, etc.

The other piece that I think is really important about the program is that students see their advisor and peer mentor once a week, which is on average far more than students used to see their first year advisors. The peer mentor piece has been super powerful for the program, for the students and the peer mentors alike. A lot of our peer mentors will say it’s like one of the best things that they’ve done in terms of an engaged learning experience.

I think it’s also good for students who, say, come midterms get Bs and Cs when they’re used to that. They can find camaraderie amongst their Pathways class and realize that they’re among many others who are having these sorts of new experiences. These experiences can be stressful and anxiety provoking, but I think it lowers the temperature a little bit when you see them as what everyone’s going through.

This goes back to the resiliency project that’s meant to help students understand the things they’re experiencing—setbacks, failures, challenges, roommate conflicts—and help them develop skills to work through and learn from these experiences. Pathways is aimed to increase resiliency. And the pilot showed Pathways students self-reported more resiliency than the control group.

What has student and faculty feedback looked like?

It depends. When you’re talking about feedback on the outcomes of the program—like students’ reported level of belonging and things like that—those are in line with what we would expect. Are there students that dislike Pathways? Yes. Are there students that really think Pathways is great? Yes. It’s like anything else; there’s a mixed bag. I don’t think the majority of students think Pathways isn’t useful, which is what our assessments have shown so far. There are challenges—not all the students complete the surveys. That’s just part of doing surveys, right? But the majority overall are still finding it useful. They might find some of the content less useful, and some of the students really do push back on it, and those are all things that we try to listen to, gather, and address.

The advising committee is responsible for taking all that feedback every year and making changes to the program and curriculum. They look at what students are saying—what they find not useful or don’t like. I will say that if a minority of students raise something we might not make the change right away, because those students might be really well prepared for college while others are less so, but we at least try to take that feedback into consideration. The great thing about the program is that because it’s modular, we can make adjustments and evolve really easily. And the committee’s job is to do that every year.

We have gotten some faculty feedback recently. Only 100 faculty responded, and the big divide about Pathways is whether the faculty member taught the class. Faculty who have been a Pathways advisor definitely have a more positive view than those who haven’t taught in it. That’s an interesting data point.

I mentioned we have a vote coming up in the 2027-28 academic year. We’re going to make changes to the program before then based on all this feedback. What those changes will look like is mostly up to faculty governance, advising committees, and faculty who weigh in on what those changes should look like. Pathways isn’t a stagnant thing. It’s a living thing, and we’re going to have to make adjustments to respond to the faculty who have issues with it. The goal is not to get rid of it. I think it’s really useful.

We see retention going up—very few schools have gone back to pre-Covid retention between freshman and sophomore year—and we think that’s really important. We have to really think about what’s best for the students over time. We’re also seeing higher rates of use of the Center for Academic Success. We’re seeing students going earlier to the Malone Center for Career Engagement. It seems very likely that Pathways is benefiting students in the end. They have a resume and they have done an interview. I do think the original need is still there, and we need to make sure that we’re providing students with all the information and support they need to be successful.

What are some of the changes the advisory committee overseeing the Pathways’s curriculum has made based on student or faculty feedback?

They make curricular changes. Things like doing this but not that module or taking into account that something might become less relevant based on what’s happening at Furman and in the world. Honestly, I can’t give you examples of the specifics because I’m not that far in the weeds, but they’re adjusting the curriculum based on what’s working and what’s not working. They’re not making big changes. The big changes are going to come—if we make those—as we go closer to the vote. Could you go from a two year program to one year? We could think about that. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing, but the idea is—in great Furman fashion— that we’re innovators, right? We’re going to come together and think about how to make this program really good, and continue to evolve and move it forward.

To give you examples of recent faculty discussion, there were two open forums in the fall for faculty to come and give feedback on Pathways and have in-person conversation. There are also always opportunities to give written feedback. So that conversation is happening. One of the conversations we’re having simultaneously is about the liberal arts. What’s the future of the liberal arts? How does Furman define the liberal arts? I think it will be great if those conversations start to come together. We’re going to continue to do the traditional liberal arts and embrace the strengths we have in that space, but like any other school, we need to think about what’s next, what’s new, and what’s important for students to have in their curriculum. So I could see those two conversations feeding off of one another as we move closer to making any changes to the program in the next couple years.

What is the relationship of the Duke Endowment to Pathways?

The Duke Endowment supported The Furman Advantage, and not just Pathways. The more costly parts of The Furman Advantage were making sure that we have stipends for all summer internships and research. A lot of the Duke Endowment funds have gone to making sure students get a $3,500 stipend to do research and internships. Now, that’s not all Duke Endowment funds. We have our own Furman funds, we have grant funds, and we have restricted funds, but that’s a big lift every year. We also invested in the Malone Center. We have invested in positions to try and execute the 100% guarantee to engaged learning. So Pathways is part of many things that get funded.

The rough cost of Pathways is about a half-million dollars per year. When you compare that to a lot of the other things we do, Pathways is relatively cost-efficient. Contrast that with the study away budget, which is close to $4 million a year. So, yes, some of the Duke Endowment funds are supporting Pathways, but they’re also supporting a lot of the other elements of The Furman Advantage. And I would say many of those are more costly than Pathways.

How has Furman improved since you came on board? Are there any ways where you feel like we’ve declined?

I’ve been here 25 years, and like I said earlier, I was convinced from the beginning of what an amazing place Furman is, and that has not wavered. Our strengths are still our tremendous faculty that prioritize our students. I’m biased when thinking about improvements because I think I’ve been a part of the most recent improvements through The Furman Advantage. But I think that through The Furman Advantage people really became aware of what we were doing and became better able to talk about it, which was something new for me in my 25 year span. Students say “The Furman Advantage,” and though they might not completely understand what that means, they at least had some language for the things they did while at Furman.

I have always thought the challenge for me at Furman is, how do we differentiate ourselves? Because I do think we do things better. I think we do things more intentionally. I think more students get more experiences. One of the things we’ve seen is about a 15 to 20% increase in students who have two engaged learning experiences. So 60% of students are doing two internships, two research experiences, or one of each. That is a huge differentiator, even compared to our liberal arts competitors.

I also think it’s just clear that we have improved our advising and mentoring. I think we have definitely improved on career prep in terms of students understanding where and how to get help. One of the things we learned early on through the Gallup data was that we were failing the students after graduation who weren’t going to grad school, med school, or law school. Pathways is part of addressing that. It makes them think about what skills employers and graduate schools want. It teaches how to get those skills in sophomore year.

For years three and four we created the Purposeful Pathways Program. The Pathways Program is the first two years. Purposeful Pathways is years three and four, where every academic department now has a faculty member whose job it is to think about discipline-specific types of professional-development activities, opportunities, and skills that students in the department need. They partner with the Malone Center, help students with internships, and bring programming to the department for students to engage in. That has been wildly successful.

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Where do you see Furman going in the next 20 years?

The higher-ed landscape right now is really challenging. The liberal-arts landscape is incredibly challenging. The enrollment landscape is like the wild wild west. And so we’ve got things we really have to take head on. We need to keep evolving the transformative student experience that we have created. And honestly in higher ed, people point to us as the exemplar. You know, we just appeared in Dream Schools. But how do we keep evolving with it? That’s the question about the evolution of liberal arts. What engaged learning opportunities do we need to think of that maybe are more relevant now than they were five or ten years ago? We still need to evolve and do better.

For example, we’re looking to do more industry-specific career coaching. The Malone Center recently hired a finance/business consultant to help students interested in those fields. The idea is that as soon as a student expresses interest in finance/business as their career trajectory, there is a person that they can go to that has all the specialized knowledge, contact with alums and corporations, and know-how to help them find internships and eventually jobs. Over time, we want to create more advising positions for more industries. We chose finance as a pilot because, if you don’t already know that’s what you want to do and have solid direction by the time you’re a sophomore, you lose out on opportunities. And students were telling us that we needed to do better in this particular area.

How are you looking to grow academically?

For one example, this past fall, the faculty approved a new Finance major. We’re also looking at some data-science opportunities. We have the Data Analytics minor that has been wildly popular. We’ve been thinking about how we can build that out into computer science or applied math. We’re also rebuilding our Physics department a bit, and have a new chair. He’s hopefully recruiting two new faculty right now. One of the things we’re trying to address is students who say, “I think I’m interested in engineering, and though I don’t really know what that means, I certainly am not going to Furman because they don’t have anything in that field.” Well, I would disagree. What we’re hearing from people looking to hire engineers or bring them into their master’s programs is that they want engineers with liberal arts skills! Applied physics is an area that speaks to some engineering possibilities, while still allowing students to study in a liberal-arts context.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I really feel that out of 25 years, the last five to ten have seen serious change. The higher-ed environment is difficult. Enrollment is changing. But I really believe that Furman is having a moment. There’s a lot of good things in alignment right now. We have worked really hard to figure out what our future is, and we know what we have to do. We know what the challenges are and we have a plan to address them.

Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

Dear Elizabeth:

Our March Belltower Times includes recognition of your excellent remarks at the Furman Bicentennial Convocation. The FFSA hopes the views you express at the Convocation can penetrate the collective minds at Furman, especially the faculty. You announce a clear vision for the university’s future: “This is our commitment: Furman is and will be a place where students learn how to think, not what to think. Where they practice listening to perspectives that challenge their own. Where they discover discomfort isn’t danger, and disagreement isn’t disrespect.”

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Similar statements at the Tocqueville CLP in October and the faculty’s declaration in April, The Lines Furman Must Not Cross, are welcome and set out admirable principles to support your vision. Nevertheless, these declarations beg a question: do they describe the reality at Furman, or aspirations for the future?

The faculty statement, while admirable in many ways, is puzzling. The faculty states that it is, “gravely concerned that our mission is in danger” and darkly points to “[g]rowing political pressure [seeking] to curtail international education, narrow institutional autonomy, restrict academic freedom, and suppress open discourse.” Who or what is the faculty talking about? It never says. “[O]ther institutions,” unnamed, have “respond[ed] to these pressures by compromising their values” and have “chill[ed] protected speech.” The faculty even writes that it “will advocate for and protect students, faculty, and staff who may be targeted due to their political beliefs.”

And yet, everyone knows that some Furman faculty let students out of class so they could join a crowd in front of the library to mob, taunt, and bully Peter Paluszak, who was engaged in an officially authorized pro-life demonstration. (This deplorable incident is covered in full here.) Along with pervasive student self-censorship, which you have eloquently recognized as a problem, this event leads me to question how worried some members of the Furman faculty really are about chilling protected speech and protecting students “targeted due to their political beliefs.”

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Still, the faculty embraces “free inquiry” as “foundational to a learning community” and lists other important principles, which we commended.

Your statements explicitly express a vision, … a standard to be achieve … and so honestly recognizes that there is still work to be done and shuns scary language about shadowy threats.

For its own future in the extremely competitive environment of small liberal arts colleges, Furman needs to take your vision seriously, so that it can increase enrollment by attracting more students from the full spectrum of political beliefs. The university should become known as the campus where viewpoint diversity is cherished as a core principle of its academic life.

Over the next year and beyond, the FFSA wants to help Furman achieve your vision. A few examples of what we plan in this respect.

• We will sponsor a student essay contest on free inquiry and academic freedom with a generous cash prize for first and second place, judged by a distinguished panel of current faculty and alumni.

• We will help Furman improve its FIRE free speech ranking, which now sits at 195th out of 248 schools. Two specific reforms will help.

  • Adopting institutional neutrality, pledging not to take sides in political controversies

  • Aligning Furman’s sexual misconduct policies with Supreme Court free speech standards

• Working with FIRE and the Furman community, the FFSA seeks to sponsor an annual debate on a genuinely difficult topic. Our goal would be to model substantive civil discourse, a goal consistent with both your vision and that of the faculty.

• FFSA will continue to advocate for the elimination of all discriminatory DEI policies and offices. The time is long past when a narrow and politicized understanding of “diversity” influences decisions on hiring, promotion, and tenure.

Furman can and should set itself apart from the community of small liberal arts universities as a campus where free speech, viewpoint diversity and academic freedom are enshrined, practiced and protected. Our goal is to help Furman achieve that status.

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Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President,
Furman Free Speech Alliance

Apologies for the duplicate message; the previous one was sent in error.

This week, we focus on the perspective of Tyler Tewell ‘25, a former Pathways Peer Mentor.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

My experience was fairly standard, as far as I can tell. When I was in the program myself, I opted to stay in for the full two years (Pathways was optional at that time). As a peer mentor, I worked with the incoming freshman class for the entire year. The workload was minimal for both students and mentors, though mentoring was a bit more involved. I taught classes alongside the professors and enjoyed the one-on-ones I got to have with students across semesters.

What are Pathway’s positive characteristics?

Pathways has some definite pros. It levels the playing field by promoting access to student resources and teaching soft skills like study habits, active listening, and school/life balance. It also provides students with people in their corner who can directly support them on an individualized basis.

What are the program’s flaws?

Unfortunately, the program’s flaws can stem directly from its benefits, because the program isn’t optional. When students already know what they’re being taught, assignments often wind up being more busywork than beneficial. Also, the Pathways class itself often interrupts or halts student activities and planning throughout the week.

There is a general sense that very few students like Pathways. Why do you think that is?

Simply put, the course is primed to get on students’ nerves. Most Furman students enter their first year already prepared and ready for majors, social life, and the college experience as a whole.

As I mentioned above, students were permitted to opt out when I took part in the program. I didn’t stay because it benefitted me, I stayed because it was easy. I imagine being forced to stay is what made Pathways into the inconvenience many students see it as. That and the fact that it’s two years instead of one.

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Are there ways that Furman could improve the program?

Reducing the time it takes is the most common suggestion I hear for improving Pathways—taking the essential information in the curriculum and condensing it into the first year experience. Alternatively, creating a point at which the program can be opted out of, either by choice or through proven knowledge, might give students a greater sense of agency within a system that is intended to benefit them.

Is there anything else you want to say about Pathways?

I’m not actively against the program, but even after experiencing it as both a student and a peer mentor over three years, I’m not in support of it either. I think that’s significant, and it makes me want to see Pathways improve.

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Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Provost Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

• 👏At Furman’s Opening Bicentennial Celebration on February 13, President Davis made a commendable statement highlighting the importance of free speech to Furman’s future:

  • “Our students… were stepping into a fractured world where disagreement is treated as danger—where the idea of common ground often feels like a relic of the past… So we did something requiring courage. We created our Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Expression—the rock on which discourse and progress would be built. A space where students could practice the hardest skill: engaging thoughtfully across difference. And on that foundation, we built On Discourse. This is our commitment: Furman is and will be a place where students learn how to think, not what to think. Where they practice listening to perspectives that challenge their own. Where they discover discomfort isn’t danger, and disagreement isn’t disrespect. It isn’t easy work. But it’s what Greenville needs, what South Carolina needs, and indeed, what the world needs.”

• Furman made it onto the U.S. News and World Report’s list of the 30 most beautiful college campuses.

• Furman master’s student, Sierra Burns, attended the State of the Union as a guest of First Lady Melania Trump and a representative of her Foster Youth to Independence Program.

• The Southern Conference Basketball Championships are set to take place this weekend. Games open on March 5 and the championship will be on March 9. Watch and cheer on our Dins!

Furman Trivia:

How many governors of South Carolina graduated from Furman University? Can you name them?

A) 2

B) 5

C) 4

D) 3

*Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!*

Let Alumni Serve Without Ideological Screening

Last month, Furman University opened nominations for its alumni leadership boards and councils. According to the university’s website, these bodies exist to “mobilize alumni leaders to cultivate lifelong engagement and advance Furman’s future.”

The Furman Free Speech Alliance shares that mission. We are deeply committed to Furman’s long-term flourishing. That is precisely why we feel both encouraged and concerned by the university’s recent announcement.

Let us begin with the concern.

The nomination form for alumni board service includes language stating that “Furman University is committed to building a diverse and inclusive community” and requires applicants to explain how a nominee would “support that commitment as a volunteer leader.” However well-intentioned, this requirement functions as a DEI-style pledge. In our view, such pledges too easily become political litmus tests rather than neutral measures of a candidate’s qualifications and commitment to the institution.

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DEI has been among the most debated and polarizing developments on American campuses in recent years. Alumni boards should be places where graduates of every background, profession, and viewpoint feel equally welcome to serve. When service requires affirming contested ideological language, even implicitly, it risks narrowing the pool of willing and qualified volunteers. That would undermine the very goal of broad alumni engagement.

We raise this concern not as outside critics, but as alumni who want Furman to succeed.

There is much to praise in this new nomination process. This is the first time Furman has broadly promoted its alumni boards and publicly solicited nominations from across the alumni body. In the past, these boards often grew by word of mouth, with new members nominated primarily by existing members. Opening the process to all alumni is welcome reform. It signals a desire for wider participation and a more representative range of voices.

The Dins Digest alumni newsletter deserves credit here. We have previously commended it as evidence of a healthier approach to alumni relations—one focused on genuine engagement rather than transactional fundraising. The decision to use it to invite open nominations is another positive step. We have heard that the alumni office has already received a strong influx of nominations and is encouraged by the number of Paladins eager to serve.

That is why it is so important to address the concern now.

When we previously urged the administration to reconsider DEI pledge language in faculty and staff applications, the university listened and meaningfully softened the wording. That responsiveness was appreciated. It demonstrated that Furman can uphold its commitment to community without requiring applicants to affirm language that many reasonably view as ideological.

We believe the same adjustment should be made here. The current language appears to be a holdover from a period when DEI rhetoric was more aggressively embedded in the institution.. It does not reflect the broader, more open approach that this new alumni initiative otherwise represents.

If Furman’s goal is to mobilize alumni leaders to advance the university’s future, then removing or revising this pledge would ensure that the effort to broaden participation is not inadvertently constrained.

We applaud the university for opening the nomination process. With a modest but meaningful revision to the form, this initiative could fully live up to its promise.

CLPs of the Month:

Furman students must attend 32 Cultural Life Programs (CLPs) to graduate. CLPs are university-approved events meant to “enrich” and “build community.”

Here are some interesting CLPs coming up in March:

• On Thursday, March 12, “Democracy and Protest-Social Movements” will teach students how “social movements have transformed democracy in the US by expanding participation, challenging injustice, and holding institutions accountable.”

• On Wednesday, March 25, Furman’s annual “Sex in the Dark” will dim the lights and allow students to ask questions about “broadening your perspective of sexuality and relationships.”

Trivia Answer:

a) 2 - Mark Sanford (‘83) and Richard Riley (‘54).

* John Calhoun Sheppard studied law at Furman but likely “read law” under practicing attorneys in the traditional 19th-century style rather than formally graduating.

** Ibra Charles Blackwoord attended Furman’s preparatory school but graduated from Wofford.

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The administration presents Pathways as their attempt to “[ensure that] every student maximizes their college experience.” The program claims to connect students “with dedicated advisors, trained peer mentors, and a comprehensive support network that guides [students] through every step of [their] academic and professional development.” During weekly classes through the first two years of college, students receive guidance in building resumes, having conversation across differences in belief, and other necessary elements of college and career preparation.

What’s not to like? Well, those familiar with Pathways’s on-the-ground execution have long perceived a wide gulf between the Program’s promise and the Program’s reality. Students and professors alike doubt its utility and are frustrated by its requirements. These, of course, are not universal sentiments, but they are wide-spread.

It was this disparity between administrative rhetoric and feedback from students and professors which led the Furman Free Speech Alliance (FFSA) to begin investigating the Pathways Program more seriously.

We have conducted interviews with faculty, students, and administrators, both on and off the record, in an attempt to comprehend why the program has created discontent among so many of its participants. The result is Perspectives on Pathways, a compilation of interviews intended to make public a wide array of viewpoints on the program. This project is not a campus-wide survey and it is not intended to give any systematic indication of Pathways’s popularity. Instead, it aims to give voice to Pathways’s defenders and detractors alike, to better inform the broader Furman community about what is happening on campus.

In addition to the interviews, we want to offer some reflection on what we’ve learned over the course of FFSA’s investigation. We recognize—as I think any fair reader of the interviews will—that some of the program’s goals are laudable. It is good to provide systematic instruction in academic integrity and connect students early with career-preparation resources, for example. At the same time, we have come away with some serious concerns.

The Pathways Program, while not a serious academic endeavor, awards students four academic credits over the course of two years. We think this practice fails to meet the high standard of academic excellence Furman has traditionally modeled. Additionally, students tend to view aspects of the Program which don’t deal substantially with college or career preparation—such as reflection exercises, “storytelling” modules, and conversations about personality tests—as wastes of time. We think this is seriously damaging to the university’s ethos and share the concerns of many students about how effective a required, once-weekly class can be at prompting serious and productive reflection.

If Furman’s administration is going to advertise Pathways as one of the university’s flagship initiatives, then they should strive to make it excellent. Right now the program is mediocre at best. Successful reform of the program could take different shapes: Furman could fortify the curriculum to make it more worthy of academic credit, as Dr. Turner suggested in her interview, or they could strip out the parts not substantially related to college and career skills, as several students suggested in their interviews. Whatever direction they choose, it is clear that the Program needs reform.

Ultimately, the nature of that reform—and whether the Program continues in existence at all—will be decided by a faculty vote. This is fitting: Furman’s faculty are its sentinels standing guard against encroachments of academic rigor. They are best fit to judge and reform the program. We call on Furman’s faculty to consider the issues carefully and to exercise their power with wisdom and faithfulness to their office.

The project’s interviewees speak for themselves. They do not represent or endorse the views of FFSA, or of any other interviewee.

We will publish our first interview featuring Tyler Tewell ‘25, a former Pathways Peer Mentor, next Wednesday (March 4). Each subsequent week, we will publish another perspective from a Furman community member, including interviews from:

• Provost Beth Pontari, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost

• Professor Helen Lee Turner, Professor of Religion

• Nathan Johnson, Junior, Politics and History Major

We will also be conducting more interviews. So, if you are a student or faculty member who has experience with Pathways and would like to voice your perspective, please reach out to us at furmanfreespeech@gmail.com.

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Celebrating Valentine’s Day this past weekend, we thought we’d take a look at what dating and marriage have been like at Furman over the years.

At freshman orientation in 1995, President David Shi reportedly told students: Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you is going to marry someone you meet at Furman.

At the time, many believed Furman had an especially high rate of alumni who met and married. That belief gave rise to campus folklore, most notably the legend that couples who share their first kiss under the Belltower will eventually wind up at the altar. Today, the legend still endures.

Whether you choose to believe it is another matter. But the question remains: Was there ever truth to Furman’s reputation for producing marriages? And does it still hold today? Are Furman students and alumni more likely to get married than their peers at other schools?

The available data are limited, but what we do have suggests that Furman once did have a notably high marriage rate. In 2018, The New York Times reported on a study by the Equality of Opportunity Project tracking Americans born in the early 1980s. The study followed where they attended college, their parents’ income levels, and whether they were married in 2014.

According to that study, 65% of Furman students born between 1980 and 1984 – likely attended Furman between 1998 and 2006 – were married in 2014.

Nationally, this placed Furman 99th. We lost out to 13th ranked Samford with a 74% marriage rate. Wofford edged out Furman, ranking 80th with a 66% rate. But we ranked higher than Davidson (183, 61%), South Carolina (415, 54%), College of Charleston (439, 53%). For more details, see the chart below:

Of course, overall marriage rates do not prove that Furman students were marrying one another. But given the limited data available, it is the best indicator we have to evaluate the origins of the Belltower legend.

So what about today? Is Furman still producing relationships that lead to marriage? Is the Belltower magic still working?

The answer, unfortunately, is likely not — or at least not to the same extent.

In recent years, a handful of couples have gotten married shortly after graduation. But these cases appear to be the exception rather than the rule.

Fewer and fewer Paladins have been looking to meet a spouse on campus in recent decades. And by some accounts, many students have stepped away from dating altogether.

As early as 2001, Furman Magazine described the campus as experiencing a “dating vacuum,” defined by “two extremes: those who don’t date, and those looking to earn their ‘M.R.S.’ degree.” The article also noted a broader cultural shift, as students at Furman and across the country increasingly preferred “hookups” over traditional dating, contributing to a decline in campus dating culture nationwide.

Twenty-five years later, not much seems to have changed.

In 2021, a Furman student interviewed three different female students about dating at Furman. Each referenced Furman’s prominent hook up culture, leading the author to conclude that “because a lot of Furman’s culture revolves around hookups rather than dating, people sometimes feel pressured to do that.”

Furman is hardly unique in this trend. The transformation of dating culture has taken place on college campuses across the country. Still, it feels ironic — perhaps even a little disappointing — that a university known for its romantic legend, and frequently chosen as the setting for weddings and engagements, seems to be producing fewer such stories among its own students.

And yet, perhaps the Belltower legend still holds some quiet power.

A happy belated Valentine’s Day to all.

Dear Elizabeth:

I want to begin by recognizing some great service from the Furman Library. My online search for an article in the November 1971 issue of the Furman Review was unsuccessful. Exactly 43 minutes after writing the Furman library, Lauren Lundy responded with the article I needed attached in an email. Kudos to Ms. Lundy.

One of the benefits of celebrating Furman’s bicentennial is how it helps us understand the principles that have sustained the school. The Furman Free Speech Alliance consistently points to a set of challenges our alma mater faces today, urging the administration, faculty, and trustees to acknowledge these problems and confront them.

For example, we frequently highlight the need to confront the lack of viewpoint diversity on campus, the problem of student self-censorship, the difficulties of the Pathways program, enrollment and budget challenges, and more. Our reading of Furman’s past, inspired by this bicentennial year, tells us that Furman has prospered from its humble origins when it has shown courage in acknowledging and meeting roadblocks to success and when it has recognized that its future hinges on promoting free inquiry, honoring intellectual merit, and respecting the diverse ideas that arise from the pursuit of truth.

To understand what I mean, I direct your attention to Albert S. Reid’s sesquicentennial article in the Summer 1976 edition of The Furman Magazine, “Issues Resolved and Unresolved in Furman’s 150-year History”. (As an aside, I once again urge The Furman Magazine to return to its intellectually stimulating past.)

For Reid – and remember he writes in 1976 – the primary unresolved issues are “Furman’s church-related identity” and “its financial base”. Fifty years on from Reid’s article, the latter issue certainly remains, but the former was finally and firmly resolved.

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Reid’s account of the resolved issues is a short walk through Furman’s history. Some of those issues may strike us today as quaint:

• Should Furman have dorms? “[F]ear of immorality and religious heresy among students” housed together “ran strong”, he notes. Dorms were built, but for anyone who has lived in one, those concerns might appear at times to have some merit.

• Should Furman be a regional or local college? “To survive, Furman could no longer be content to be a Greenville and South Carolina college even if it wanted to be.”

• Should Furman be coeducational? “Since the 1930s, coeducation has become essential for Furman just as mixing the sexes was anathema in the earliest days.”

• Should Furman remain in Greenville, or seek a campus outside the city? Reid’s account shows how truly vexing this issue was. The question of “location… preoccupied the school for more than fifty of its 150 years.” There was clearly a bit of foot-dragging going on.

But many of the other resolved issues taken up by Reid are anything but quaint.

• “Furman [recognized] that learning and the prestige of learning depended upon the right of teachers to teach without intimidation because of personal beliefs.” I would add to Reid’s account that this “resolved” issue is always threatened to be undone in times of deep ideological division.

• Furman resolved early on that it “should have high standards based on academic excellence.”

• Furman resolved, specifically under Gordon Blackwell, that it would achieve “excellence by national standards.”

(A curious omission in Reid’s account is the resolution of the issue of racial integration, which he mentions only in the context of ongoing disputes between the Board of Trustees and the Southern Baptist Convention.)

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Reid’s history shows that, over those first 150 years, Furman confronted significant obstacles to sustaining a college grounded in the pursuit of truth, maintained by freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression.

Today’s obstacles are no less daunting for a modern university. Financial concerns remain very much on the table. But so too do issues of academic integrity, free inquiry, and robust debate.

Bending to trends such as adherence to a narrowly defined idea of “diversity”, or accepting a homogeneous political culture, will only serve to undermine the tradition of “high standards based on academic freedom” that Albert Reid celebrated in his fascinating sesquicentennial history of Furman University.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance

• It is February, but it does not look like we are in for an early spring. Furman, like much of the country, remains covered in ice and snow.

• Furman is set to host its Opening Bicentennial Convocation on February 12.

  • Furman is also collecting stories from alumni and friends about moments that have shaped the university over the last two centuries. If you have a memory from your time at Furman, we encourage you to submit it through the university’s bicentennial story portal.

• Furman recently celebrated Joseph Vaughn Day, which honors the legacy of Furman’s first black undergraduate, who enrolled 61 years ago on January 29, 1965.

  • At the ceremony, the Idella Goodson Glenn Outstanding Black Alumni Award went to the Rev. Regenald Garrett ’98, senior pastor at the historic Jubilee Baptist Church and president of Furman’s Black Alumni Association.

• Finally, congrats to the women’s basketball team, who beat Wofford on a buzzer-beater last Friday and claimed their fifth straight victory, giving the Paladins their best start in conference play since the 2004-05 season!

Furman Trivia:

Joseph Vaughn was the first black student to attend Furman in January 1965. But who was the first black student to apply to Furman, and what year did he or she first apply?

A) 1962

B) 1957

C) 1961

D) 1964

*Find the answer at the bottom of the newsletter!*

Furman’s Connection to the First Amendment

On January 29, the Post & Courier published an excellent piece examining the role that Furman University’s namesake, Richard Furman, played in America’s founding era.

Written by Courtney Tollison Hartness ’99, a Distinguished University Public Historian and scholar at Furman, alongside Emily Anne Harris ’25, the article offers a fair assessment of Furman’s life and makes a compelling case that his legacy deserves greater appreciation than it receives today.

As a free speech organization, we were especially interested to learn that Richard Furman was a “staunch advocate of religious freedom.” And as it turns out, Furman and his fellow Baptists played a central role in advancing First Amendment protections.

After rising to prominence through rousing anti-British speeches during the Revolutionary period, Furman eventually became pastor of Charleston’s First Baptist Church in 1787. From this position, he served as a delegate to South Carolina’s 1790 constitutional convention, where he pressed for the disestablishment of the Church of England and for the incorporation rights of all religious denominations in South Carolina.

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At around the same time, Baptists in Virginia were facing fines, whippings, and imprisonment for “unlicensed” preaching. More than thirty ministers were punished. This unfair treatment elicited the ire of men like James Madison, who would go on to become the “Father of the Constitution.”

During the ratification debates of the late 1780s, Baptist leaders, including the preacher John Leland, expressed serious concerns to Madison about the protection of religious liberty under the new Constitution. Madison reassured them that he would seek constitutional amendments safeguarding religious freedom. With these assurances, Baptists supported Madison’s election to the First Congress, after which he played a leading role in drafting the First Amendment.

While there is no record of direct correspondence between Richard Furman and Madison during this period, their paths did cross later. During Madison’s presidency in the 1810s, he invited Furman to address his cabinet. The encounter underscores Furman’s national stature and the seriousness with which his views were regarded.

The bottom line is that without Baptist advocates like Richard Furman, the First Amendment might have settled for mere “toleration” — a fragile, government-granted allowance — rather than the strong guarantee of “free exercise” that we have today.

For us at the Furman Free Speech Alliance, this legacy is both instructive and motivating. It reinforces our commitment to ensuring that Furman University does more than tolerate different opinions. We want a school that actively encourages robust, principled debate across lines of disagreement.

A university named for Richard Furman should aspire to nothing less.

We look forward to learning more about Furman’s history in Courtney Tollison Hartness’s recently announced bicentennial history of the university. Notably, it will be the institution’s first official history since 1976, published at the time of its 150th anniversary.

CLPs of the Month:

Furman students must attend 32 Cultural Life Programs (CLPs) to graduate. CLPs are university-approved events meant to “enrich” and “build community.”

Here are some interesting CLPs from February:

• On Tuesday, February 3, “Uncivil Resistance and Queer Activism” will offer students the opportunity to learn about “the kinds of resistance that the queer liberation movement has mobilized against the silencing and stigmatization of gender and sexual minorities.”

• On Wednesday, February 11, an “Afrofuturism Fireside Chat” will allow students to use “a critical lens for understanding how Black communities have imagined alternative futures in response to historical exclusion from dominant narratives of progress, technology, and modernity.”

• On Monday, February 23, “Swiftynomics: Women and Our Economy” will explore “the life and work of economic force and global icon Taylor Swift to examine the hidden contributions and aspirations of women—spotlighting the unmeasured value they create by pursuing their own ambitions.”

Trivia Answer:

D — 1964 is the year that LaBarbara Powell Sampson became the first black student to apply to Furman.

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Before January ends, we want to take one more look back at 2025.

As longtime readers will know, On Discourse was launched in Fall 2023 and has become Furman’s premier initiative to improve the free-speech climate on campus and to “encourage constructive discourse across differences.”

In 2025 alone, nearly 2,000 Furman students participated in On Discourse events and activities. In December, the program released an end-of-year report detailing its impact, which you can read in full here.

For our purposes, we want to highlight several encouraging data points that suggest On Discourse is meaningfully improving students’ attitudes toward free speech and open dialogue.

Consider this graph from the report, which compares student responses before and after participating in intensive “teach-in” events focused on current political topics such as DOGE and tariffs.

Prior to participating, only 39% of students disagreed with the statement:

“If I am sure about something, I don’t waste too much time listening to other people’s arguments.”

After participating, that number rose to 55% — a 16-point increase. In other words, On Discourse helped a significant share of students recognize the importance of listening to new ideas and arguments, even when those ideas challenge their firmly held beliefs.

The program also made students more willing to engage with people who hold different social identities and perspectives. After participating, 59% of students (up from 55%) disagreed with the statement:

“I avoid conversations with people with other social identities who hold really different perspectives from my own.”

In addition to the teach-ins and other CLPs, some students also enrolled in new “discourse-based” courses, including the class on Civil Discourse discussed by Dr. Liz Smith in our latest Paladin Report.

These courses produced similarly positive results. Agreement with the statement “conflict is healthy in a democracy” increased by 6 percentage points among students who participated in the courses.

Students also reported substantial gains in their comfort and confidence discussing controversial issues. The share who felt somewhat or very comfortable expressing perspectives that differ significantly from their own rose from 53% to 68%.

Meanwhile, confidence in discussing difficult topics with people who hold opposing views jumped nearly 20 points, from 62% before the course to nearly 80% after.

Finally, large majorities of students reported that these courses improved their ability to listen with empathy, think critically, appreciate diverse perspectives, and participate in discussions without escalating conflict.

All of this represents real progress.

Furman still has a long way to go in creating a truly healthy climate for free speech. Most critically, the university must address the lack of intellectual and political diversity among its faculty — an issue we highlighted in our latest letter to President Davis.

But for now, it is worth recognizing the good work already accomplished by the On Discourse program. We hope President Davis will continue to grow and expand this effort in 2026 and beyond.

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Last spring, Dr. Smith taught a course on civil discourse. We asked her what she learned from teaching the course and how she assesses Furman’s ongoing efforts to strengthen civil discourse.

Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman.

I have been at Furman for 28 years. I am a professor of political science in the Department of Politics and International Affairs, and I’m also the assistant faculty director of the Cothran Center, which is the center for vocational reflection on calling and purpose. I previously served as chair of the politics department and am originally from Charlotte. I went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota and attended undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill.

In the Spring of ‘25, you taught a course on civil discourse. Tell me about the class, what you wanted to accomplish through it, and your experience teaching it.

The course was structured to meet three goals. The first goal was to get students to really think about the essential role of civil discourse in democracy—especially our democracy—and the value of a marketplace of ideas.

We talked about the First Amendment, representative government and deliberation, and also the historical context. We discussed whether we are in a uniquely uncivil time, which I think a lot of people think, or whether this is just part and parcel of living in a democracy where you have disagreements.

The other thing we considered during the first part of the semester was what “civility” and “incivility” actually mean. We looked at a lot of different scholars and a lot of different opinions, and there is real disagreement.

Some would say uncivil discourse occurs when you’re not polite; that rudeness is a form of incivility. But there are also forms of civility and incivility that are deeper and perhaps more significant than whether you’re polite or impolite. Some scholars say that civility requires a kind of responsiveness where you recognize someone else’s ideas.

Others talk about civility as public-mindedness, where there’s a commitment to the common good in the exchange you’re having as citizens about politics. There’s also deliberative civility, which occurs when we ask, “Are you playing by the rules of the game in terms of how we talk to one another?” be they written or unwritten rules.

Other scholars talk about moral civility, which means recognizing another person’s right to exist and to have an opinion different from your own. So there are many ways that we can approach judgments of discourse as civil or uncivil, and I think that’s a conversation we need to be having.

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What about the second part of the course?

The second part of the course examined the origins of incivility and disagreements through the lens of psychological- and political-science literature. We started with Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations theory, which examines how we have a shared set of moral values, regardless of where we are on the ideological spectrum.

Generally, there are core things that people think are important when it comes to morality, and those are that we don’t harm people, that we don’t cheat, that we don’t betray, that we follow the rules, that we don’t degrade ourselves or others, and that we don’t oppress one another. Part of the problem we have in understanding one another is even though we all have these core shared moral values, different parts of the ideological spectrum emphasize certain values more than others.

Liberals, for example, tend to emphasize care, fairness, and not doing harm. Conservatives have a broader set of moral values that emphasize authority, loyalty, and patriotism. Haidt argues that we talk past each other, because we don’t take the opportunity to think about the value roots of someone’s opinions.

We talked a lot about motivated reasoning. As information processors and as human beings, it’s just how we work—we look for stuff that confirms what we already believe, and it’s very hard to persuade people of something they don’t believe. When we disagree with someone, most of us will try to feed our interlocutor a ton of facts and information to persuade them.

But people resist these counterpressures because, as research shows, what we believe is really central to our understanding of ourselves. We even resist listening to different ideas. We need to think about our own reaction to people we disagree with, knowing that we’re motivated reasoners, and try to overcome that problem in our thinking.

We also talked about the rise of partisan and social media. Contextually speaking, incivility is not uncommon in democracies, but things get significantly worse when modern social media, partisan media, and media accessibility combine with our motivated reasoning.

It’s really easy to cocoon ourselves, because it feels really good to find your team. Politics is a little bit like sports in that way. People get a sense of belonging, and that group identity makes it easy to stereotype or diminish the other side. We really have to pay attention to the effects of partisan social media.

And what about the third part of the class?

The third goal was to get students to practice engaging in civil discourse. We have to learn how to be citizens and we have to be socialized into democratic norms. The students did this on a lot of different levels all throughout the course. We explored many organizations on the left, right, and middle that are trying to bridge differences and give people opportunities to practice the art of civil discourse, including My Neighbor’s Voice here in Greenville.

We talked a lot about learning to listen, which is one of the really significant first steps to engaging in civil discourse and can help us overcome motivated reasoning. We also talked about listening to understand and not just to respond. When you listen attentively, the speaker does a better job of presenting their ideas than they do when you aren’t listening.

When I teach, if I have students who are nodding along and engaged, I become a better teacher than if they’re looking at their phones or spacing out. Same thing with conversation—if somebody’s really listening to you, you become a better conveyor of what you believe. They then understand you better, and you build trust. And the research shows that this sort of listening helps folks moderate their opinions instead of doubling down.

We also talked about the role of debates. There’s a very healthy way to debate that Braver Angels utilizes that isn’t like a high-school debate format, but does allow people to take a side. There’s a moderator who restates what one person says and then tips it to another person who has the opportunity to respond. That method was very effective with the students. They chose the topic of America’s role in the world, and it was a very good conversation.

The students also led a deliberation with OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which serves older adults. They led a discussion on the issue of immigration, and it was a really interesting, cross-generational conversation. We did not all agree, and it was a really great way of learning about other people, what they believe, and why they believe it.

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Ideologically, what sorts of students were drawn to the class? What kind of personalities did you have?

There were a lot of politics students, but not exclusively. The class was small—around 15 students. It was also a three-hour seminar, so that already takes a special kind of student. I had freshmen through seniors in the class, which worked out well.

This group—like almost all Furman students I’ve ever interacted with—were really thoughtful. They were critical thinkers who really wanted to have deep conversations. We never deliberately asked people about their ideology or partisanship. Every once in a while, somebody might reveal it, but we didn’t ask.

There was serious disagreement though, which was great. That’s what I’d hoped for. It’s hard, because you can’t really say, “Okay, I need five Republicans in this class and five Democrats,” so I just had to take what I got in terms of who was attracted. But most importantly, they were really curious, and yearned for deep, good conversations.

What trends are you observing regarding civic discourse among the larger student body?

My main sense of this comes from what I experience in the classroom and what the students tell me. It’s anecdotal, and it can be hard to fully grasp what’s going on. But what I hear from students is that many self-censor, especially in their personal lives.

I’ve heard them say things along these lines: they came to college anticipating having really cool, deep conversations with people they disagree with, and learning new things. But what they end up facing is a nervousness around conversations about politics because of the possibility of fraying a relationship that they didn’t want to fray. They have to live with the people they disagree with. They’re in your dorm room or across the hall, and students feel like they can’t risk damaging a relationship that they need to be good.

I think it’s that fear of partisanship that is more problematic than actual partisanship. I have a friend who’s been in a retirement community for six months. She’s very active and does all the activities. She told me no one has brought up politics once in six months.

So this phenomenon apparently replicates itself in other venues, where people have to live together and get along. It’s really too bad—it’s not helpful for a functioning democracy. I also think social media provides ways to take people down that didn’t exist in the past, and people are just on pins and needles about that.

There are really bright spots though. We do “Pizza and Politics” in the politics department, which is an optional, informal conversation about politics over pizza. The room is packed. We end up pulling in chairs from the seminar rooms and out of people’s offices. And we have diverse conversations and disagreements that for the most part—99% of the time from my perspective—have been very civil.

Now, these are people who’ve come together specifically to talk about politics. It’s not the dorm room and it’s not a classroom. I think students do report self-censoring in classrooms because they’re afraid of their peers, or they have a perception that the professor will hold it against them if they articulate another point of view.

It makes me very sad to think that students don’t feel like they can say what they want to say. I guess there might be a professor who could make you feel unwelcome, but mostly I think faculty really want interesting conversations. We really want you to bring in diverse perspectives.

From your perspective, how is On Discourse going?

I think On Discourse is a great initiative. It’s always nice to have more opportunities to get students engaging in conversation. I like the dialogue format; I led one on the issue of partisanship on campus, and we’ve also had ones on patriotism, America’s role in the world, etc.

It’s an excellent educational opportunity where you have a little bit of setup by experts or scholars about the various perspectives on an issue, and then you allow students the opportunity to talk at tables with a moderator. So there are rules, and people come to it with purpose.

But you know, the obstacle that comes with things like On Discourse, my class, or Pizza and Politics, is that they’re not the real world. In the real world, we have to function in places where there isn’t a moderator and there aren’t rules, and so we also need to recover a sense of civic life and morality—a sense of our responsibility as citizens in a democracy.

Democracy is the hardest form of government you can have, and we have to socialize people into democratic norms and accustom them to the idea that we’re not always going to agree, and that we must value and respect the opportunities for people to disagree.

Ultimately, I am a very strong believer in free speech and the marketplace of ideas. I really do agree with John Stuart Mill that the way to get to the best ideas is to entertain them all, and that through conversation the bad ones will be revealed.

I think when you suppress speech, you give that suppressed speech more power than it might deserve, and you also divert the conversation to focusing on the suppression of speech rather than talking about the issue itself.

Should any speech on campus be restricted? If so, where should the lines be drawn?

That’s a really, really hard question. It goes back to what I talked about at the very beginning—about what is civil and what is uncivil. I think the Supreme Court has gotten it right generally, in terms of how we understand free speech in American politics and what it means in our democracy.

The incitement test is where they draw the line—along with obscenity and threatening talk. They also do allow time, place, and manner restrictions on speech, and the court has ruled—I think rightly—that educational institutions are somewhat different than the real world. In the real world, when someone is saying something threatening or that denies your right to exist, you can walk away.

In an educational institution on the other hand, you have to interact with those people. And people shouldn’t have the right to speak in a way that threatens you so much that you can’t learn. Now, there’s a judgment call there.

One has to establish what is so problematic that a student couldn’t come into class and learn because his or her brain is so tied up and stressed about something another student said. I think we should deal with that by erring on the side of allowing people to try out their ideas and say what they want to say. I always try to tell my students that sometimes we speak “in draft,” and as a result, we will make mistakes.

We need to come up with community norms—like we did in the civil discourse class, for example—where you recognize that sometimes people are speaking in draft or trying out new ideas, and that they’ll make mistakes or say something that comes across in a way they didn’t mean, even though they had good intentions.

In a classroom, if you can facilitate a willingness to forgive honest mistakes, that can help mitigate conflict and maybe widen the scope of things people feel are okay to say in a classroom. But there certainly have to be some limits. You can’t have a good educational environment when some people are denying other people’s right to exist. So it’s a little bit different than the real world, and the courts have recognized that.

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What are the most significant threats to free speech and civil discourse at Furman going forward?

Self-censorship. I think a thriving educational community is one where people feel like they can talk to one another, not just in the classroom, but also in their personal lives. Students spend more time out of the classroom than they spend in the classroom, and they’re learning in those external environments. You should be sitting in the hallways talking about interesting ideas and new things that you’re learning. That hesitancy—that concern that you’re going to damage your relationship just by sharing your opinions—is very worrisome to me.

Dr. Tessitore was a great professor, beloved by many alumni, and represents what Furman can be at its best.

A memorial service will be held this Sunday, January 18, at 2:00 PM in the Charles E. Daniel Chapel. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorials be directed to the Tocqueville Center.

You can join us in supporting Dr. Tessitore’s legacy by giving to the Tessitore-Nelsen Tocqueville Endowed Fund.

Finally, we invite all of you to read more about Dr. Tessitore’s life and legacy.

Dr. Ben Storey wrote a reflection for Law and Liberty, which you can read in full here.

Dr. Brent Nelsen also wrote a reflection, which he has given us permission to republish below:

It is with great sadness that I inform you of the passing earlier today of Dr. Ty Tessitore, one of the truly great Furman professors of the last half century, and a founder of the Tocqueville Center. What follows is my modest attempt to say something worthy of a man who influenced me more deeply than I may even fully know.

Ty was the very model of a teacher-scholar. He was a master of the lecture style; students were riveted to his every word. It probably didn’t hurt that Ty looked like a Greek god—ripped like a statue of Hercules—but it was his intellect that truly held the room. His dedication and excellence as an instructor were recognized in 2002 with Furman’s Meritorious Teaching Award.

He was as accomplished a scholar as he was a teacher. Fluent in Greek and French, Ty’s mastery of Aristotle was unmatched. He authored or edited two influential books and remains the only member of the Department of Politics and International Affairs ever to have published in the American Political Science Review, the discipline’s most prestigious journal. Moreover, he had begun a book on Tocqueville that a stroke tragically kept him from finishing. I once found the introduction in an old Tocqueville Center file passed on to me. I read it in awe. I suppose I’ll have to wait to read the rest when we meet again in the New Heaven and the New Earth.

Many of you know that Ty was a priest before settling in Greenville as a layman. I know little about canon law, but I do know that he remained in good standing with the Church. I also know he never lost the heart of a priest. All could see he never stopped loving his students as a pastor.

Ty wanted his students to ask big questions and to think their way toward answers by wrestling with the great works of the past. That dream lives on in the Tocqueville Center, which he founded and which now stands as his enduring legacy at Furman University. I am proud to stand on his shoulders as we continue the work he began.

Godspeed, dear friend.

Dear Elizabeth:

Happy New Year. This is the bicentennial year for Furman. There is much to celebrate and much to reflect upon. The FFSA looks forward to all the plans that seek out alumni participation.

I would like to begin the year with some reflections on the idea of “a whole campus culture of open inquiry,” a phrase drawn from Heterodox President John Tomasi, who joined you at the Tocqueville Forum in October and a gave a subsequent interview with the FFSA.

For a campus to support a culture of open inquiry it needs three elements says Tomasi: “First, it [needs] protections for the free exchange of ideas. Second, it [needs] a variety of viewpoints on the campus — among the faculty, students, administration, and trustees. Third, it [needs] constructive disagreement.”

One element alone is insufficient. Indeed, a campus with two of the elements, no matter how robust and imbued with institutional support they might be, will fail to build “the conditions for scholarship” at a university.

Why?

Because “if you have a university that has formal protection for the free exchange of ideas, but everyone there thinks pretty much the same way, you don’t have viewpoint diversity. If you formally protect the free exchange of ideas and you have a variety of viewpoints on the campus, but the viewpoints are all balkanized into the different groups so people aren’t listening to each other, you don’t have constructive disagreement.”

On a campus where free speech is encouraged, where there are true differences of opinion, and where disagreement is looked upon as constructive, there you have what Tomasi calls a “magical process” that creates a culture of open inquiry.

Of the three, the hardest to create is viewpoint diversity.

We know this at Furman.

Your excellent Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Free Expression demonstrated Furman’s commitment to the first element, a culture of open inquiry through the protection of free speech. Your creation of On Discourse addresses the issue of constructive discourse by teaching skills such as active listening. Taken together, these are critical steps toward creating a campus culture of open inquiry.

But without viewpoint diversity, notes Tomasi, “‘civil dialogue’ risks becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial.”

Concerns about Furman’s homogeneous political culture were a key reason we created the FFSA. (See our Mission Statement) The Paladin’s own reporting, along with a recent survey by City Journal, finds that the faculty is far less politically diverse than the student body.

The reason this matters lies at the core of what the university stands for.

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As Tomasi has written:

“the goal is not ‘balance’ for its own sake. It is to rebuild the conditions for scholarship: conditions in which bad ideas lose because better evidence comes to light, not because they are invisible (or unutterable); conditions in which students and faculty learn to evaluate arguments they dislike, not just perform tolerance; conditions in which disciplines remain curious enough to notice what they have stopped noticing.”

The lack of viewpoint diversity on campus is a major roadblock to achieving what Furman wants to achieve -- a campus culture of open inquiry.

Are there ways to address this problem? I offer two, admittedly tentative, thoughts at this point.

1. That you lead a forum on viewpoint diversity, through On Discourse or the Tocqueville Project, or both. Presidents at other universities also struggle with this issue. Invite them to campus, along with your faculty, students, administrators, trustees, and alumni, to analyze the problem and explore potential solutions.

2. As I mentioned in my last letter to you, the Furman Magazine can challenge alumni to give serious thought to campus issues. Invite Furman professors or write scholarly essays for the magazine on the topic of viewpoint diversity and the mission of the university. This would be an excellent way to start working through this issue, while bringing the expertise of your alumni to bear on this vexing problem.

All the best for the New Year,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance