Over the past several months, we have published seven interviews with Furman’s students, alumni, faculty, and administration on the Pathways Program, Furman’s flagship advising initiative. Our goal was to publicize a variety of perspectives on the program in the hopes of examining the disparity between administration marketing and student and faculty feedback.

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While the interviews uncovered a wide variety of opinions and perspectives, they also contained some consistent through lines: on the positive end, Pathways seems to have seriously improved freshman-year advising, a process which many alumni can attest was poor. The program also provides substantive career preparation. The example students most frequently lauded was an assignment where they reached out to a Furman alum working in a professional field that interested them. In Anna VanDoodewaard’s case, the combination of sound college advising and career field exploration were invaluable, leading to greater clarity in her college and post-graduate plans.

And yet, while we have learned many positive things about Pathways through these interviews, the concerns outlined in project introduction are still very top of mind. We understand, as Dr. Margaret Oakes and Ms. VanDoodewaard pointed out, that giving some academic credit for Pathways is necessary as an incentive for students, and is common practice in other endeavors which aren’t strictly academic, like internships.

At the same time, if Pathways is to receive academic credit, the rigor of its classes should more nearly resemble an internship rather than a summer orientation. This is sometimes—and maybe often—the case, but it is increasingly clear that the lapses of rigor have an outsized effect on student perception of the program.

No student we interviewed on or off the record took issue with Pathways’s career preparation. Most students highlighted it as something they really enjoyed. Yet many still had an overall negative impression of the program. Recent Furman graduate Vivian Claire described it as “babysitting.” Rising senior Nathan Johnson called the program a “safety net.” Former Pathways peer mentor Tyler Tewell described the experience as “being forced to sit in a class that spoon-feeds…buzzwords and asks for hollow feedback and reflection.”

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This dynamic also addresses the question of time. Pathways does not, all things considered, take up much time. It is one session per week for four semesters. But, if the curriculum doesn’t provide worthwhile material sufficient for two years of class, then the program nonetheless is too long. Our concerns about academic rigor and the time Pathways takes are linked: at the end of the day, a program like this should last as long as it takes to teach the valuable parts of the curriculum, and not longer.

Students want to be challenged, and they know when their time is being wasted. That may not be true of every student at Furman, but we think it is true of most. For the students who don’t want to be challenged, Furman should challenge them anyway. Rigor and high expectations should be the norm, not the exception.

Students don’t hate Pathways simply because they don’t know what’s good for them. The students we interviewed are academically high achieving and very involved in Furman student life. They presented nuanced and mature reflections on their experience in the program. Yet they all—to varying degrees—considered chunks of the curriculum wastes of time.

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Pathways is the one class required of all Furman students. It sets the tone for how students perceive the administration in particular and the university at large. It should therefore represent the best of the university, not the worst.

This year, Furman has demonstrated an awareness that not all is right with Pathways. They held focus groups and listening sessions with students and faculty, asking for feedback on the program. We laud these efforts, and encourage the university to listen to and act on thought-through criticism.

As we mentioned in our project introduction, Pathways reform could go in many different and legitimate directions. Therefore, in lieu of making specific recommendations, we wish to make one broad proposal: try to do less.

This is the list of Pathways program objectives listed at the top of the Pathways 101 syllabus:

1) Develop intellectual curiosity and academic competence

2) Establish and maintain meaningful interpersonal relationships

3) Develop one’s identity, purpose, and integrity

4) Establish and maintain personal health and wellness

5) Develop multicultural awareness and competence

6) Explore potential majors and academic directions, including study away, research, and internships

7) Explore career paths and identify ways to build career competencies

8) Develop career competencies, including professionalism

9) Learn about the components of leadership and models of social change

10) Engage in reflection on one’s own development

When one remembers that this class meets for an hour a week, it should not be surprising that Pathways falls short of its lofty goals. By trying to do everything at once, it ends up doing very little well.

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Furman has long instilled intellectual curiosity and multicultural awareness in its students in the classroom and on study away trips. Furman students, like everyone, most often develop their identity, purpose, and integrity through the experiences they have outside of the classroom while living everyday life. Pathways’s architects should be willing to outsource student formation that other parts of the university are better equipped for, in order to focus on doing their part with excellence.

The departure of Elizabeth Davis and search for a new Furman president presents the university’s leadership and faculty with the opportunity to evaluate her legacy. While there is much to be proud of and grateful for, there are also things to be improved. We encourage Furman’s leadership to make Pathways better. The more substantive and useful the program, the more students will respect their university and be proud to be Paladins.

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Dear Elizabeth,

Your trusty correspondent is going to take a break until August. (I know this comes as a huge disappointment.) I will return in August with news of FFSA’s program for the 2026-2027 academic year and further reflections on the challenge of campus viewpoint diversity, among other thorny issues.

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But the FFSA will have a very active summer as we concentrate on the Presidential Selection process. And so, I leave you with the major question we will be asking: Will the process enhance or undermine the chances of selecting a president who can execute the core mission of a university: the pursuit of truth sustained by freedom of inquiry and respect for the diverse ideas that arise from the pursuit of truth? All other considerations are footnotes to this core criteria. And while we will be relentless in our advocacy for alumni involvement and transparency on Furman’s part, we will never lose sight of the university’s core mission.

Very soon, FFSA will have a great deal to say on this matter. Stay tuned and have a good summer.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance

• 📣 President Elizabeth Davis announced she will step down. On May 18, Davis informed campus that the 2026–27 academic year will be her last. The Board says it will “soon establish a presidential search committee, comprising trustees with representation from faculty, staff, students, and alumni.”

• 💰 Furman’s “Clearly Furman” capital campaign is set to conclude this month, having raised more than $500 million.

Furman Trivia:

Furman’s 2014 presidential search drew from a wide national pool. Roughly how many candidates did the committee consider before choosing Elizabeth Davis?

A) 20

B) 40

C) 60

D) 100

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

How Much Did Furman's Record Freshman Class Really Cost?

We have followed Furman’s enrollment closely. In fact, last month we celebrated the news that Furman’s incoming freshman class will likely be its largest in over a decade and congratulated President Davis on her success.

Since then, we have learned two things:

1. President Davis plans to step down at the end of the upcoming academic year.

2. Furman’s large new freshman class is the result of incredibly expensive outsourcing to professional consultants.

Financial documents reviewed by the Furman Free Speech Alliance indicate that Furman paid the consulting firm Bain & Company nearly $5.9 million in fiscal year 2025 alone. According to a source with knowledge of Furman’s engagement with Bain, much of that money went toward embedding Bain consultants directly in the admissions office to run student recruitment for the 2025–26 cycle.

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Worse still, according to the same source, this year’s class was achieved in large part through unusually aggressive tuition discounting. A Furman professor with knowledge of the matter independently confirmed this and added that because of those discounts, the larger class is expected to generate little or no additional net tuition revenue.

This is seriously disappointing from a financial perspective. We celebrated Furman’s increased enrollment because we believed that it would improve the university’s finances and address the concerns of ratings agencies like Fitch, who cited declining freshman enrollment when it revised Furman’s bond outlook from stable to negative last July. The fact that we had to pay an outside company millions to reverse this trend speaks to just how bad the situation is at our alma mater.

Just as troubling as the financial picture is the lack of transparency from Furman’s leadership. After years of declining enrollment President Davis has been touting this year’s increase in the freshman class as a signature accomplishment, but she is not being forthright with alumni about the way Furman brought in these new students.

This is especially concerning as we prepare to begin a search for Furman’s new president. To find a candidate who has the right combination of experience, leadership qualities, and management skills necessary to do the job, the Board, faculty, alumni, and donors who care about Furman’s future need to have a clear picture about how difficult that job really is.

Now is not the time for carefully curated success stories. We need to be more clear-eyed than ever about Furman’s enrollment struggles, its unpopular Pathways Program, its lack of viewpoint diversity, and its culture of self-censorship.

Why? It’s not because we want to diminish Furman or attack the many hardworking faculty and staff who work there. Quite the opposite. We are demanding transparency because we love Furman and a candidate who is sold an idealized version of our university cannot be expected to lead it well.

So, as Furman’s Board moves forward in its search, we urge them to make transparency a priority. Washington & Lee (W&L), who is also looking for a new president, has already launched a dedicated search website, publicly named its search committee and the firm leading the search effort, asked for community input, and begun posting regular updates to the entire university.

Furman can and should do all this and more. Whoever serves as our next president will play a critical role in determining the future of our university. Making sure we have an open process to identify candidates will help ensure that we find the right person to lead Furman — challenges and all — into its third century.

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Trivia Answer:

C) Roughly 60 candidates. In the 2013–14 national search, Furman’s presidential search committee narrowed an initial field of more than 60 candidates down to 13 for preliminary interviews before unanimously selecting Elizabeth Davis as the university’s 12th president.

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This week, we bring you the perspective of Anna VanDoodewaard, a junior French and History major.

VanDoodewaard speaks in defense of Pathways, highlighting the key role that her Pathways advisor and the curriculum’s career exercises played in helping her select her major. VanDoodewaard also criticizes the less substantive aspects of the curriculum, and offers thoughts on potential program reforms.

Tell me about your experience in Pathways.

I’ve had a really good experience with Pathways. I think the best and most impactful part of it was really the advising. My advisor was incredible, and she was always there for us. Her office door was always open for my classmates and me, and we could go to her at any time with questions, concerns, or anything else that we had on our minds. I remember going into her office multiple times and just brain dumping things I was thinking about, be it academics or career ideas, and she would patiently listen and ask insightful questions. It helped me untangle and process things, and also allowed me to discover new talents and interests that I hadn’t known about before.

I actually ended up changing my major partly because of this advising. I had come to Furman as an intended Politics and International Affairs major and really wasn’t enjoying my first-year classes, but kept thinking I would just push through it and things would get better. My advisor saw that it wasn’t a good fit for me though, and helped me think through other options. She pointed out that some of the other classes I was taking as GERs were things that I obviously enjoyed much more than political science, and she encouraged me to explore more before committing to the Politics major. So that ended up really changing my Furman pathway.

I declared a French major first, and then a History major a year later. I’ve never had any regrets and feel that thanks to advising, I’ve made the right academic choices, which is something I’m very thankful for. I have friends at other schools that don’t have Pathways advising who have graduated either with a degree that they regret or just wishing that they’d thought outside the box and explored other opportunities. I don’t know of anybody at Furman who that’s happened to, and I think a huge part of that is the Pathways experience.

Was your advisor a faculty member or a staff member?

She was a staff member in the libraries.

Why do you think so many students are discontented with this program?

The time commitment is the reason I hear most frequently. That’s never really held water for me though. The class is an hour a week and the homework takes maybe 10 minutes. If the assignment is a reflection paper, it might take an hour or two. That’s really not that much time.

I think people also complain that it’s a really easy class that doesn’t deserve academic credit. I understand that, but I think you don’t have a lot of options. Making it zero credit means that a lot of freshmen won’t take it seriously at all, and you’re just going to end up with people skipping out. It also definitely should not be a two-credit class. I could see condensing the curriculum into one year instead of two and keeping it at one credit, but I do think the credit incentive should definitely be there.

There are also a lot of students who feel like it’s just busy work, and that a lot of it is meaningless. There are definitely some assignments where I thought, “Why are we doing this?” I remember one day where we played games with balloons, and another where we just made stress balls. I know that the intent behind these activities was good, but I really don’t think that things like that have a place in a university classroom, and definitely not in a for-credit course.

Do you think it’s possible to separate the fluff from the soft-skills training?

I think so. There were definitely some soft-skills modules that I found really helpful. As students, we’re looking at a very different career landscape than our parents and maybe a lot of faculty members did, and I think that in today’s digital age soft skills are more important than ever. I think the program does a great job of making us aware of the value of soft skills and how to go about utilizing that in the job market.

So, I think that a lot of those modules are helpful, but it can be hard to take seriously, especially if you’re somebody who is very academically driven and wants to be in courses where you’re getting things done and really engaging intellectually with material. To sit for an hour hearing about how to listen actively or ask good questions might feel unnecessary or even useless to some. But I do think these skills are really important for relationship building and networking, and that the usefulness of it will become increasingly obvious as we go into our careers.

Why is the fluff there?

I don’t know. It’s something I’ve wondered about before. I think part of it is wanting to make the class fun and interactive—which, again, I understand—but I’m like, I can also just sit here, pay attention, and have a conversation without having props like balloons or stress balls. We aren’t in elementary school anymore! So yeah, I’m not sure.

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You mentioned potentially compressing Pathways into one year. Do you think the aspects of the program that were really beneficial for you could have been done in one year? Is there any particular advantage to two years?

I think the biggest advantage to the two years was the advising experience. A lot of the second-year career modules were helpful, as well as some of the initial freshman orientation modules. I do think that there was more fluff in the first year, so I think condensing it into one year where the first semester is more freshman orientation type things, followed by a semester of career competencies, could be helpful.

The two-year advising period really helped me get to the point where I had both majors declared, I understood what my interests and career goals were and were not, and I felt like I had a very strong foundation that I was really excited about.

Would you talk about the social benefits you derived from Pathways?

Yeah, I think another benefit of Pathways is that it throws you into a group with students who you wouldn’t talk to or even really meet otherwise. My Pathways cohort was a really diverse group of students from all over the country. We had folks from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, tons of different majors, student athletes and musicians—it was really all over the place. Getting to spend two years with those people and actually get to know them—building relationships, hearing about life experiences and perspectives that were very different from the ones I grew up with—was just a really good experience. I still have friends from my Pathways class who I hang out with.

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Are there drastic differences between Pathways classes? Do some have a really good experience and others don’t?

There are definitely people in my Pathways class who didn’t love it and were very glad when it was done, but I do think most of us had a really good relationship with our advisor. I know there are some of us who still go and talk to her about things. As a class, I would say we probably had a great experience. That said, everyone is different and every Pathways course is different, so a lot does depend on your classmates and your instructor. But I think most people who I’ve talked to had good experiences with their advisors, even if they haven’t always enjoyed the course content.

Were there any particular career skills that you found really helpful?

It was probably less career skills than looking at potential careers themselves. There was one assignment where we had to research a career field we were interested in—which for me was law, particularly family law—and then meet with a Furman alum who was working in that field. That was a really great opportunity for networking, but also for getting to know what the field is really like—what’s the day to day, what are the pros and cons, etc. That experience of actually getting to talk to somebody about their job completely changed my career trajectory, and I realized I didn’t want to go into family law (or maybe the legal field in general) after all. I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to find that out before committing to law school and going down that path, and then realizing later that this isn’t what I want to do.

What do you think of the CliftonStrengths test?

I have mixed feelings about it. I think there’s only so much personality tests can do, and I do think to some extent they limit people by putting them in boxes. Students label themselves as their five Clifton strengths: “This is what I can do and this is what I’m good at.” To a certain extent some students think “If a strength is not in my top five, then I’m not good at it.” So I do think there are definitely weaknesses to it. There are positives too though. When I took mine, there were definitely things that came up in my top five that I thought were accurate in representing who I am—my beliefs, my values, and my strengths. It’s an easy way to give potential employers a glimpse of your personality and strengths, but like any personality test, it can’t accurately capture all of who you are. So I think it’s a very mixed bag.

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Dear Elizabeth,

I prepared this letter before hearing the announcement that you plan to leave Furman after the 2026-27 academic year. FFSA will write again sometime soon on that subject, but for now we simply want to say congratulations on your decision and thank you for your years of service to our alma mater.

Now for my original letter:

Congratulations on a successful commencement honoring the class of 2026 and Furman’s 200^th year. I want to note especially your letter, Furman Endures Across Centuries, published at the time of commencement, which captures the key moments in the school’s history and notes that “[a]s we improve our competitive position in the higher education landscape, we do so confidently knowing that Furman University is resilient and strong, not in spite of our challenges but because of them.”

Furman is fortunate to have that history captured recently in Courtney Tollison’s Furman University, 1826-2026: A Bicentennial History, a superb chronical of the school’s resilience you reference in your letter. And in case you missed it, the FFSA just published an interview with Dr. Tollison on our Substack. Check it out.

Your letter, Furman Endures Across Centuries. insists that Furman never shied away from big problems. And you point out that central to Furman’s willingness to act has been self-reflection – “Seeking Abraham” a prime example – and that continues to be vital as the school confronts contemporary criticisms of the modern university.

My last letter to you focused on one of those criticisms -- the lack of intellectual diversity among faculty and how that can undermine the core mission of the university. John Tomasi summarized this threat well: “Academic freedom is not the same as free speech. 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.”

Many others recognize this problem. A report released last month from the Yale University faculty points to a faculty monoculture as one of the factors leading to a historic lack of public trust in universities.

You are no doubt familiar with this study considering why universities have lost the public’s trust: grade inflation, breathtaking tuition increases, campus free speech suppression, and student self-censorship, are among the issues addressed along with a lack of intellectual pluralism.

The report notes that “conservatives have long offered a more particular critique of higher education: that the nation’s leading universities, including Yale, tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions.” And that “[t]aken together, these critiques frame universities as intellectual and ideological echo chambers, out of touch with the American nation and out of step with its political currents.” What is more “[e]stimates suggest that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans among faculty nationwide by a margin of about 10 to 1. At Yale, according to a 2025 estimate by the Buckley Institute, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management.”

We lack similar data on Furman, because of South Carolina’s registration rule, although we do know that nearly 98% of Furman faculty campaign donations went to liberal or Democratic causes. The Yale report acknowledges “push back” claiming that “the issue of intellectual diversity [is] a smokescreen for mounting restrictions on academic freedom.” Still, the report holds that “ [e]cho chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” That’s blindingly obvious.

Despite the grumbling, the report takes the problem seriously. Its recommendations with respect to the issue of intellectual pluralism comes down to self-examination. It urges “each department and school [to] engage in a self-study examining the breadth of its intellectual and methodological commitments; the range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty; the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum; and the openness of its hiring and admissions practices to dissenting or underrepresented traditions.”

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Furman’s faculty should consider a similar self-examination. Do we encourage different methodical approaches, are we open to hiring and admissions of underrepresented traditions, do we avoid using our classroom as vehicles for some political cause, these are the kinds of questions that the faculty needs to ask itself.

In doing so, wouldn’t that be simply following the Furman tradition you spelled out so clearly in your commencement letter?

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance

Dr. Tollison discusses her recently published bicentennial history of Furman, delving into the process of writing the book and recounting fascinating moments of Furman’s past. You can purchase Furman University, 1826-2026: A Bicentennial History by clicking on this link. You can read the full interview below:

Would you briefly introduce your book?

Published in February 2026, Furman University, 1826-2026: A Bicentennial History offers the most thorough assessment of the history of Furman University. The book was published by Duke University Press and includes nearly 1200 images and over 400 pages of text. We started with Dr. Richard Furman’s birth in 1755, so we had a lot to cover. Furman, the institution, is only 50 years younger than our nation.

When I reference “we,” I’m referring to my co-authors, Bryant Garrison ’25 and Emily Anne Harris ’25, and to Pender Raymond ’27, who joined us in the summer of 2025. This truly was a highly collaborative effort, which made the process so much more fun.

What has been written previously about Furman’s history? How did you draw on those volumes in your book? What is distinct about your work?

I’ve consistently studied Furman’s history since my senior year at Furman. Before I started writing this book, I was already familiar with what had been published on Furman’s history, on Richard and James C. Furman, and on the Greenville Woman’s College. University histories were published by President William J. McGlothlin in 1926, Dean Robert N. Daniel in 1951, and Dr. Al Reid in 1976. I was also fairly familiar with articles and other works that have been written about specific aspects of the university’s past.

As I dove deeper into this project, however, I spent more time than ever before with these histories. Not only did I begin to feel a certain kinship with their authors, but I felt a mounting sense of responsibility to them and to their efforts, and to the Furman community of the past and present.

Every version of Furman’s history is a product of its times; the questions we ask and the events that we find relevant and interesting are a reflection of our culture and values. The past doesn’t change but the way historians write about it does; such is the nature of the field of history. Our history of Furman not only covers more chronology, but it includes people who have always been part of Furman’s past but haven’t always been included in its history. Additionally, it is the first to weave together the histories of Furman and the Greenville Woman’s College.

Why did you opt for a coffee-table-book format?

Provost Ken Peterson first talked with me about a bicentennial history beginning in 2021. At the time, I was in the final stages of publishing a history of Greenville with USC Press and actually suggested several other people for the project because I didn’t think I had the bandwidth to do it the way it needed to be done. Throughout 2022, I remained tempted but non-committal. I should mention that my husband and I have 3 young children, so I was already extremely busy with my home life and teaching.

In November 2023, when I told President Davis I would do a book for the bicentennial, I planned to do a coffee table book, thinking that that format would be easier than a monograph and would be appealing to the Furman community. As I dove deeper into this project and the significance of the bicentennial hit me, however, I realized we needed to author a book that was worthy of a bicentennial.

The result is a book with lots of images combined with the depth of scholarship we would have undertaken had we written a monograph. So really, its images and layout are coffee table quality, and the research and analysis are what you would find in a monograph. And now, looking back, I can’t believe I nearly gave up what has been an extraordinary opportunity to craft Furman’s identity. It has been an incredible honor and I’m so grateful to Provosts Peterson and Pontari, Liz Seman, and President Davis for believing I could do this even when I didn’t see a way to do it myself.

What is “Then and Now”?

Then and Now is the last chapter. It was originally conceived as the chapter where we would cover organizations, traditions, and other aspects of Furman that have transcended the downtown campus and the present campus, such as football and the Furman Singers.

Richard Furman and James C. Furman have complicated legacies. How do you approach them in the book?

That is a very insightful and diplomatically phrased question. As a historian, I seek context balanced with whole-truth history. As a human being, I’m reminded of Bryan Stevenson’s quote: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

Richard Furman was a visionary. The legacy of his contributions to our country, to the Baptist faith, and to education have endured for centuries. He was also an enslaver. We wrote about each of these aspects of his legacy and sought to understand how his writings about slavery were shaped by his nearly life-long goals of uniting Baptists in lowcountry and backcountry South Carolina and saving souls.

His son James C. Furman lived during a much more intense period of strife regarding slavery. We wrote about his involvement in secession and his unwavering defense of slavery. His public and private pronouncements were based more in motivating others by fear, whereas his father was much more scholarly in his defense of slavery.

Yet, James C. Furman worked tirelessly after the Civil War to revive the institution, which had closed, and to regain viability and, eventually, financial stability. He refused pay and turned down lucrative opportunities at churches and the presidency of the University of South Carolina, noting in regard to Furman that “it is better for one man to be sacrificed than for a great institution to be imperiled.” Without James C. Furman’s efforts, Furman wouldn’t have survived the 1880s.

What role has free speech played at Furman over the years?

As an institution of higher education associated with the SC Baptist Convention (SCBC) throughout most of its 200 years, the issue of free speech and academic freedom was one often determined by trends within the SCBC, Furman trustees (all of whom were SC Baptists), and Furman’s president. The first instance of free speech and academic freedom that comes to mind is a controversy with several professors in the early 1900s. It’s a long history, one capped most recently by the university’s adoption of a Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Expression in 2024.

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How did Furman end up a beneficiary of the Duke Endowment?

It’s a great story that is featured on p. 108 in the book. Thirty years before Ben Geer was president of Furman, he served on the Furman faculty. In 1911, he left Furman to manage several mills in the Greenville area. In this role, Geer became very close with one of his board members, James B. Duke. Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, the Dukes and Geers traveled together and the Geers stayed with the Dukes at their residences in Manhattan, New Jersey, and Charlotte. On one of these trips aboard the Duke’s private railcar, named for their daughter Doris, Geer told Duke about Furman. Years later, in 1924, when Duke was finalizing the investiture of trust, he allegedly looked over at an assistant and asked, “what is the name of that school in Greenville that Ben Geer is such a fool about?” His assistant couldn’t remember either, so Duke penciled in “Ben Geer’s college.” Henceforth, Furman has been one of four institutions of higher education (along with Duke, Johnson C. Smith, and Davidson) that has benefitted from the endowment for over a century.

And interestingly, when Greenvillian John D. Hollingsworth was setting up the Hollingsworth Funds, which since 2001 has also been of great benefit to Furman, he asked a friend, Red Hughes, to obtain a copy of Duke’s investiture, which Hughes provided. Hollingsworth modeled the Hollingsworth Funds in part on the Duke Endowment.

I communicated several times with staff at the endowment, who shared images and data with us. In its first century, the Duke Endowment granted nearly $538 million (adjusted) to Furman. As we wrote in the book, Furman’s relationship with the Duke Endowment has been “transformational.”

How did you approach writing about Furman’s split with the South Carolina Baptist Convention?

Very thoughtfully, and with a regard for the long view of this relationship and for the many perspectives involved in its demise. I have attended First Baptist Greenville for most of my life, so I had some understanding of these issues when I began conducting oral histories with people on both sides of the split in 2004. Furthermore, noteworthy figures in this process have shared their papers with me over the years. Minor Shaw gave me a box of papers collected by her mother, Minor Mickel—who chaired the board during the split—after her mother died in 2005. In 2008, Benny Walker, who was integral to this process day in and day out, also gave me his personal notes.

The material on the split is 23 pages; it doesn’t appear at the end of the book, obviously, but it was the last section I wrote. I knew it was going to be long and complex, and it was. I’m grateful to Neil Rabon, Baxter Wynn, Benny Walker, and Helen Lee Turner, who offered thoughtful feedback on my drafts. What appears in the book is the first published history of that event, and it needed to be done well.

What is your favorite part of the book?

My favorite parts have been the process and the reaction the book has received. Working with Bryant, Emily Anne, and Pender was among the most rewarding experiences of what has been a deeply fulfilling career thus far.

For reasons beyond our control that had to do with the dye that was created for the book cover, the books were delayed. The books arrived on campus on February 11, the day before we kicked off the bicentennial, around 1PM via a 53-feet long tractor trailer (the books and pallets collectively weighed over 18,000 lbs.) from Manitoba, where the book was printed. It was nerve wracking and in the days leading up to the bicentennial I obsessively refreshed Fed Ex tracking updates.

On the morning of February 12, President Davis began her remarks at the bicentennial convocation by announcing the book’s arrival and holding it up for the audience in McAlister. Later that day, Bryant, Emily Anne, Pender and I gave a presentation to a standing room only crowd in Watkins and received a standing ovation midway through our presentation. I’ve also received wonderful letters, emails and comments from people, many of whom were involved in the events we have written about. These have been very special and rewarding moments.

Do you have a favorite Furman president?

Well, truly, I’m grateful to President Davis for commissioning this book and for believing in the value of looking backward to thoughtfully root Furman’s identity, which of course contextualizes our present and future. I admire her and her leadership. I’m also grateful to her and to First Gentleman Charles Davis for the stability they bring, and to Charles for his meticulous stewardship of White Oaks.

Looking back, I feel so fortunate to have known Mrs. Plyler, President and Mrs. Blackwell, President and Mrs. Johns, and the Shis, Smollas, and Kohrts. My mother worked in President Blackwell’s office at Furman when she was in her 20s. My parents remained friendly with them and we visited them on many Christmas Eves. I used to love talking about history with President Johns and I miss his humor. I was close with Martha Johns in her later years, and love and admire Susan Shi—as everyone does!—for her continued commitment to Furman and Greenville. The Shis were in office when I was a student, so they both will always be special to me. Carl and Lynne Kohrt are so loyal to Furman, and are also wonderful people.

Having said all that, my favorite president from the more distant past is Bennette E. Geer. He was quite progressive, committed to academic freedom, and developed close and meaningful connections between Furman and Greenville for the mutual benefit of both.

Did you discover anything unexpected during your research for the book?

I had never thought much about the impact of having administrators and faculty living on Furman’s campus, but that is the way the downtown campus was. I came to appreciate the close, familial bonds and the deep loyalty to Furman and to each other that resulted from that. In this part of the book, we quote Al Reid, who described those administrators and faculty as “great and good men, dedicated to their students, to Furman, and to their church and community.… They were the ideal of a church-related faculty, equally at home in the classroom and the church, men of character, piety, and compassion.” For more, read pages 122-124 from our book!

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This week, we bring you the perspective of Dr. Margaret Oakes, Professor of English and Chair of Furman’s Humanities Interdisciplinary Minor.

Dr. Oakes mounts a defense of The Pathways Program, arguing that students need the soft skills its curriculum seeks to inculcate, even if they don’t believe that as freshmen. She also responds to common criticisms and lays out some of the benefits she sees students reap from the program.

Tell me about your experience with Pathways.

I taught year-one Pathways for the first time this year, which means this is the first time I’ve had a group of kids. I will continue with my group next year for year-two Pathways. I also do upper-level Pathways with the English Department’s majors. That’s fun, because I’m the only professor who gets to meet all of the English majors, due to the two tracks we have in the department. I also had a little bit to do also with the initial development of the Pathways curriculum.

What is your evaluation of the program as it stands right now?

I recently got a message from somebody who graduated in 2019. This student was not an English major, and not somebody I ever expected to hear from, but he called out of the blue. He said, “I just wanted to call you and your colleague [who was with me on the study away trip that we went on] to apologize because I was kind of an immature person, and you guys gave me so much grace. I’m older and more mature and wiser now, and I would say thanks, and I’m sorry.”

My point here is that our job does not have immediate returns, and you have to sit with that as an educator. So I get phone calls like that. I get emails from people who are about 15 years graduated saying, “Hey, I’d like to have that book list again,” or, “This came up and it reminded me of something we read in class.”

So there’s two sides to this. One is, “I learned things, but I didn’t know how they would be important until later.” And the other one is, “I have become a better and more mature individual.” Both of those are aspects of college education. No one who’s a freshman in college thinks they need Pathways because, like my sister would say, they think they’re a baked cake, but they’re just cake mix right now. All the stuff is there, but it’s not done. If you’re a freshman in college, and you’ve been the cock of the walk last year, you think you’re a grown up. But you’re not. We all hope we’re better people than we were when we were 18.

I think the program’s value is in starting conversations to try and build the soft skills employers like. How do you manage people? How do you manage conversations? When you become a boss or a parent, you understand how important it is to engage in active listening, but when you’re 18, you don’t have enough experience to know that you will need that. So I think most of it is just planting seeds that, frankly, students don’t care about right now, but that’s fine, because they will grow. We also talked about really practical things like time management. But a lot of it is developing soft skills that students may not appreciate now, but that they’ll need later.

Are there any examples of this curriculum having an impact on students in the short term?

We were in a class discussion about how your words can impact other people, and you may not be aware of it. And one student said, “Yeah, I don’t really worry too much about what other people think about what I say.” And I didn’t say anything, but she got real quiet after that. I thought, “Maybe she’s thinking that that’s not the best idea.” These conversations can provide some space to reflect on your own approach to things. Maybe she’ll think about that, and start to think before she opens her mouth in the future. We have to just lay the groundwork, walk away and see where they take it.

Is the soft-skills building mostly discussion based?

It depends on the topic—we do go through some really practical stuff. Like, how to look through course listings and tips and tricks on how to make a good schedule so that the classes aren’t all full when you go to register. We get granular about college management. Much of it falls under “the stuff I wish that somebody had told me.” I would say that’s about half of it. We walk through the way we think about majors and minors at Furman. We’re also trying to alleviate somebody getting midway through junior year and thinking that they can do something, when they’ve actually blocked themselves out of it by not having a prerequisite. It’s an attempt to forestall problems in the future.

The other half is maturity skills. Such a variety of people come in as freshmen. Some students think that you can’t teach them anything, and some are having imposter syndrome and are scared that they shouldn’t be here. Those students are a little bit easier to teach sometimes, but you have to deal with both ends of that spectrum of approach to becoming an adult. “I think I already am, or I feel like I never will be.” I always try to say, “Hey, you’re going to be a boss someday, and you will need to know how to manage people and present ideas in a way that is persuasive.” So some of it’s discussion, some of it is logistical skills.

How much is the quality of the Pathways experience dependent on the quality of the instructor?

No more or less than any other class. There is a high number of staff who teach the program. I would like more faculty to do it. If a faculty member is already dealing with freshmen by teaching an FYW (First Year Writing Seminar) or first-year students in other capacities, that professor may not want to deal with first-year students in an additional capacity. So I totally get that. I do think some of the staff people are just killer at this. They see the students in ways that we don’t, and they know a lot more about their lives than we do.

So I think that’s a good balance, but I will say this about the curriculum itself. If you’ve never taught a class before, the Pathways curriculum has a very full facilitator guide, detailed down to the minute. I was pleased to see they created that mechanism. The curriculum is quite full, and then there’s a slide deck to go with each unit, which we can vary according to what we think is best. Sometimes a peer mentor might say “I don’t think that slide does them any good.” Or we might add something. I tend to downplay the kumbaya stuff a bit. So there’s definitely tweaking you can do yourself, depending on your own style and what you think your group of kids needs.

Are modules that were previously part of FYWs, like library skills and academic honesty, now components of Pathways?

No. There was some discussion when we first developed the FYWs about whether it would serve as an introduction to college. And those of us who were teaching said “No, there’s already too much in here.” That’s now part of what Pathways has become. It functions as a warning to students that they need to step up their game. Some students these days are much more passive than those we’ve had in the past. They think everything is going to be the way it was in high school. And college isn’t like that.

We do talk a little bit about using the library, but not much. It’s mostly just, “This is where the building is, this is what you do, and these are the people who can help you.” We don’t go that in depth on plagiarism. It’s wrapped up in generally being an ethical person. The most important thing I want them to understand is that they need to figure out what their professors’ policies are. That’s like the number one rule.

How do you see students change over the course of Pathways?

First-year students are very different people in the first semester than in the second, because they’ve gotten those grades that maybe they didn’t like, and when they come back second semester they find the content much more interesting because they realize they need it. First semester they’re all just trying to impress each other. They giggle after class and I just think, “Oh, you’re so 18.” But that’s fine. That’s all they’re supposed to be. They’re doing what they need to do. Everybody’s awkward at 14, and everybody’s awkward at 18 in a different kind of way.

Come second semester, they’ve settled down and bonded a little bit. They eventually stop seeing their teachers as the adults in the peanuts cartoons because they’re interacting with us so much over the course of their four years. And I think that makes Furman graduates better able to deal with adults after college, because you’re used to adult interaction.

Do you think Pathways has significantly improved freshman advising?

Oh yeah. Just because we’re with them all the time. I’m with them every week. When there are kids who are slowly slipping, but won’t show it on the outside, it’s harder for that to go unnoticed. It’s a safety net in the best sense of the word, in that nobody suddenly disappears. We can be more on top of that sort of thing and catch problems earlier and hopefully more successfully.

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The most consistent critique I hear from students is that the program takes too much time. Are you sympathetic to that?

You can’t come in and tell me you spent five hours binge watching some show last night and then complain about a class that takes an hour a week. Then maybe you spend about 30 minutes to 45 minutes doing a little write up. It literally does not take that much time. It takes a lot more time for me, because of all the prep and engagement it requires. Anything you don’t want to do takes up too much time in your life. I think that’s the answer there.

Another criticism is that the program is insufficiently rigorous to receive academic credit. How do you respond to that?

This is the same thing we struggle with for things like internship classes. When I used to teach those internship classes I made sure there was some academic content to them. I think I will say this: Because the students do spend, at minimum, two hours a week doing this, I don’t really have a problem with one hour of academic credit, which is all they get. They can fail it, by the way—if people don’t show up or turn in their stuff, they can fail. I think the credit provides some incentive, but it’s absolutely not worth any more than what it gets.

I think in a larger scope of things, I don’t have a problem with it because of the psychological implications of a zero-credit class: zero credit means zero work. And I’d be thinking that too as a student. In fact, I tried making upper-level Pathways [what juniors and seniors take] pass/fail, and that didn’t work. I’m going back to giving an actual grade in there, because people respond to that letter grade more than anything else.

I make my upper-level Pathways students do a research project on the industry they’re interested in going into, and the relevant issues in the field. They have to do a bunch of reading and give a presentation on it. They’re asking questions like, “What is AI doing in my industry right now?” And to me, that is academic content.

What are some of Pathways’s other benefits?

I think it can provide a low-pressure environment for them to test the waters in small ways.

I had an instance where a student turned in a final reflection that was clearly written by AI. I had to turn it over to the dean. That student has to go have a conversation about cheating on the Pathways final reflection and I’m like “Really? You want to gamble the farm on that? You’re going to have an AI-plagiarism violation on your record!” But at the same time, since they did that for this class, that’s an almost no-cost life lesson.

We also try to work through scenarios ahead of time that are likely in life. When we talk about active listening, we’ll go through things like, if you have a friend who’s in some sort of problem, how helpful is it for you to say “Well, at least it’s not [fill in the blank]?” And so we’ll go through things that people often say to each other that are really not helpful, and talk about things you actually can say to your friend or, one day, your employee or patient.

So that gets back to the soft skills, but we introduce these real-world scenarios in very unweighted ways, so that maybe the next time your roommate has a problem, you’ll think instead of saying the first thing that comes into your mind. That’s step one in maturity. Pathways is a way to think about those things—about real-life ethics and real-life plagiarism—and their consequences in an environment that has no serious repercussions, so they can work through it some.

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• 🎉 Furman held its annual Bell Tower Ball on April 18, honoring alumni and community members for professional achievement, generosity, and service to the university.

• ⚠️ Furman has announced plans to phase out its education major and elementary certification program in favor of a revised Educational Studies program.

  • We will have a deeper look at this development later this month. Stay tuned.

• 🎓 Commencement is this Saturday, May 9. Broadway conductor and Furman alumna Mary-Mitchell Campbell ‘96 will deliver the keynote address. Congratulations to the Class of 2026!

Furman Trivia:

Which living U.S. President has delivered a commencement address at Furman University?

A) Bill Clinton

B) Donald Trump

C) George W. Bush

D) Barack Obama

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

A Growing Class Is a Golden Opportunity

Last week, we argued that reversing Furman’s decade-long enrollment decline is one of the most important things the administration can do for the university. Specifically, we said that increasing enrollment was an essential first step in the broader project of improving Furman’s intellectual diversity and free speech climate, because more students mean opportunities for more faculty hires, new ideas, and a more intellectually vibrant campus.

This week, we have reason to be encouraged.

Rumors are circulating that Furman has recruited an uncommonly large incoming freshman class, with more than 670 students from the Class of 2030 having made deposits toward enrollment next fall. To put that in perspective, last year’s incoming class had 571 students, and the year before had only 621. If the deposit numbers hold, this would be one of the largest freshman classes at Furman since 2014.

Deposits are not guarantees — incoming freshmen can still change their minds — but they are among the most reliable indicators available at this stage. Anywhere near 670-plus would represent a dramatic and welcome reversal of Furman’s troubling enrollment trend. We congratulate President Davis and the admissions team. If these numbers hold, it deserves to be celebrated.

This growth will create opportunities almost immediately. A larger student body means more classes and — if Furman is serious about maintaining its 10:1 student-faculty ratio — more faculty.

We are already hearing that one of the first practical consequences of this larger incoming freshman class will be the need to add new sections of the First-Year Writing Seminar, one of the most distinctive features of a Furman education.

According to Furman’s website, Furman is one of only five colleges in the country to cap seminars like this at twelve students. Each class is built around a topic chosen by the professor to develop analytical thinking, research skills, and clear writing. Topics are not limited to any particular discipline. They are meant to spark genuine intellectual curiosity.

In light of this opportunity, we are calling on the administration to dedicate at least one of the new seminar sections to the topic of free speech and the First Amendment.

This is not a radical suggestion. The First Amendment is one of the most critical areas of American law and civic life. Debate around it is full of genuine disagreement and difficult cases. It is a perfect topic for a first-year writing seminar.

Establishing this seminar would also send a signal to incoming students that Furman takes free expression seriously.

President Davis has spoken publicly about wanting Furman to be a place where students learn how to think, not what to think. A First Amendment writing seminar would be an easy but concrete way to make that vision real on campus.

In sum, the tide may be turning on enrollment, and if it does, it will create new opportunities for free speech at Furman. Establishing a First-Year Writing Seminar focused on free speech and the First Amendment would be an excellent way for Furman to show that it intends to use its enrollment growth to prioritize free expression on campus.

The opportunity is here. It is time to take it.

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CLPs of the Month:

Furman students must attend 32 Cultural Life Programs (CLPs) to graduate.

CLP offerings slow down significantly over the summer while students are away, but there is one worth noting before the month is out:

• On Thursday, May 21, the Lakeside Concert Series kicks off its summer run with Sounds of Summer, a free outdoor concert at the Furman Lake Amphitheater from 7:30 to 8:30pm.

Trivia Answer:

C) George W. Bush — President Bush delivered Furman's 2008 commencement address in Paladin Stadium. The visit was not without controversy. More than 200 professors signed a petition opposing Bush's visit and 31 professors were granted "conscientious objector" status, allowing them to skip the ceremony entirely.

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.