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

Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What about the second part of the course?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what about the third part of the class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From your perspective, how is On Discourse going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He visited Furman during homecoming and sees a bright future for our school. He believes that his organization can help the university continue to improve its climate for free speech.

🤝What is Heterodox Academy? What are your goals and principles?

Heterodox Academy (HxA) has been around for 10 years. We’re a membership organization of professors. We’re committed to making our universities better, specifically by fostering cultures of open inquiry. We think a culture of open inquiry has three components. First, it has protections for the free exchange of ideas. Second, it has a variety of viewpoints on the campus — among the faculty, students, administration, and trustees. Third, it has constructive disagreement. That means the ability to listen to people and hear what they’re saying without closing your ears or yelling at them.

If you only have some of those things without all three, you won’t have the knowledge-building capacity of a university. So, for example, if you have a university that has formal protection for the free exchange of ideas, but everyone there thinks pretty much the same way, you don’t have viewpoint diversity. If you formally protect the free exchange of ideas and you have a variety of viewpoints on the campus, but the viewpoints are all balkanized into the different groups so people aren’t listening to each other, you don’t have constructive disagreement. You won’t get this sort of magical process that comes with the free exchange of ideas on a campus of open inquiry. You have to have all three of those components.

The First Amendment protects free speech everywhere for lots of good reasons, but many kinds of speech the First Amendment protects are not what you necessarily want on a university campus. On a campus, you want people talking in serious ways that lead to greater knowledge. Building out that culture of open inquiry is what HxA is really all about. My friend Brian Casey, who’s the president of Colgate University, said to me once: “You know John, at the end of the day, we care about the policies, but what we really care about is what kind of conversations happen in the dorm on a Tuesday night. Do the students talk? Or do they self-censor?” At HxA, our three principles are ultimately aimed at building whole campus cultures of open inquiry.

🛠️What do your daily operations look like?

Increasingly, we’re equipping campus leaders and presidents to build cultures of open inquiry. For example, we provide toolkits for institutional neutrality, which is one of the really important pillars of the culture of open inquiry. We’re developing models about viewpoint diversity: How do you hire excellent faculty while still bringing neglected ideas into the conversation? How do you encourage active, constructive, critical listening among students, rather than snowflake culture or eggshell culture? How do you break down these barriers around self-censorship? Our studies show that something like three-quarters of American students describe themselves as not saying what they believe, or not saying anything if they think it might be controversial, because of something like eggshell culture.

Another big, big thing we do is build our membership, especially among the faculty. We’re constantly recruiting more faculty and administrators into our ranks. Once we have a cohort of at least 10 professors on a campus, we encourage them to create a community—a formal gathering place where they can get together and talk about these issues and get a deeper understanding of the ideas themselves. Most professors aren’t trained in open inquiry. We’re hired because we’re excellent in our academic subfield, but that doesn’t mean we’ve really thought about university culture. So HxA tries to educate our members to become the campus experts on these things. Once members have created a community, they start recruiting more faculty, and eventually start offering their help to presidents who are trying to push for open-discourse-friendly policies. So those are the ideals, and the strategy that we use. We build organically and work from the inside. That’s the only way to build a campus culture that will endure.

🔍What kind of presence does HxA have on Furman’s campus?

The number is very small. Certainly less than 10. There were two very dynamic members, Ben and Jenna Storey, who are no longer there. When I first joined HxA, we talked about trying to build a bigger presence on Furman’s faculty. Jen and Ben told me that Furman people really value the Furman community, and there was a concern that being a Contra — which being an HxA member sometimes was in those days — wasn’t really in keeping with how most Furman professors wanted to operate.

Still, I see lots of potential for HxA to help build a culture of open inquiry at Furman. I’m hopeful that Brent Nelsen and the Tocqueville Program will serve as a rallying point for HxA to build more faculty presence in the Furman campus. Brent Nelson is great and the Tocqueville Center is just remarkable. I mean, truly remarkable. I would love to see HxA expand on the Furman campus, recruit more top professors to join us, and help Furman become the place it could be.

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🏛️What kind of relationship does HxA tend to have with universities?

We love our universities, and we want to make them better. But it’s often been the case in our 10-year history that our members found themselves in the position of being campus Contras, opposing their administrations, many of whom were going all in on DEI and other kinds of things that were incompatible with our principles of open inquiry

We’ve seen a sea change over the past two years, particularly since the Hamas attack and the Ivy League presidents’ failure to answer basic questions about the protection of free speech on campus while testifying in Congress. Suddenly, college administrators are much more interested in HxA and our insider approach to reform. They’re reaching out to us in ways they didn’t use to, even three years ago. I’ve been following the growth of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, and I think they’re also transitioning from Contra mode into being more accepted.

I hope alumni free speech alliances can seize this moment and are willing to work with their schools. You can always be a Contra, which can be interesting and fun to some degree, but there comes a point when every organization has to decide if they are willing to be insiders and help make the place they love better. Some folks just want to stick their schools in the eye, so to speak, because they’re still so angry about stuff that went down. The strength, though, is in the people who are willing to be principled allies.

That’s what I was doing when I was on stage with President Davis. I asked her about the fact that Furman used to be very focused on a certain form of DEI and now seems to be turning more to questions about constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity. What explains the change? Those are uncomfortable questions to ask somebody, but they have to be asked, because we need to talk about them honestly and openly. Otherwise reform isn’t going to be real or long lasting.

📉How did universities drift so far from the principles of open discourse?

I think universities lost their way slowly and then suddenly. One of the most striking data points to me is that in the ‘60s, faculty described themselves as being left leaning to right leaning at about a 2-1 ratio. And back then, that probably seemed like a big divide. Now the distribution is something like 20-1, roughly, and is much more severe in disciplines like anthropology or sociology, where it’s approaching 100-0. So why the change from 2-1 to 20-1? That happened over a period of 60 years that prepared the ground by weakening the critical capacity of campuses to be more mindful about the threats to free expression posed by some of the new goals universities were pursuing.

So the ground was softened by this growing orthodoxy, this lack of viewpoint diversity, this culture of intellectual conformity. I don’t think it was intentional. True, in the 60’s especially, there were some groups that wanted to bring socialism to America by taking over the universities. That is a historical fact–think of the Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society. But that’s not why the ratio went from two to one to 20-1. The real cause was not the fruition of some radical’s plan, it was some more prosaic, like mere path dependency. Academics just didn’t understand that they were getting more and more conformist in their thinking. Academic scholarship was damaged by that lack of diversity. But I think more importantly, the culture on campuses was weakened to the point where, when a new idea came to campus, like DEI or the idea the America was ripe for a “racial reckoning”— even if those ideas were in some ways valuable—it wasn’t moderated by respected voices on campus who were committed to the long run good of the school.

Instead, many who disagreed with some of the more extreme ideas in DEI were cowed into silence, and they either decided not to speak up, or they spoke up and they were savaged, fired, or canceled in various ways. So I think there were those two factors — first, a slow softening of the ground, primarily on the dimension of viewpoint diversity, and then, as groupthink started to grow, the ability of the culture to heal itself and stand up against exaggerated claims was weakened. When the DEI enthusiasm swept across the campus, there was very little to stand up against it or moderate it into more healthy channels.

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🤫What can be done to address self-censorship?

Generally, we think that peak woke on campuses occurred around 2021 or maybe 2022. Right around then is when HxA’s data shows the most self-censoring, the most cancellations, and some of the most shocking numbers — graduate students in particular were much more willing to advocate violence against speakers then. But what we’re seeing nationally over the last year and a half is a huge swiveling of attention by university leaders to this quiet question about the quality of campus culture. They’re asking, “Do conversations happen in the dorm on Tuesday night? Or are people off in their siloed groups and self-censoring?”

Nationally speaking, though, we did a big survey of presidents’ convocation addresses this last fall. There were remarkably high incidences of presidents talking about the importance of open inquiry, free speech, and constructive disagreement. The one topic that didn’t really get covered was viewpoint diversity, which is the toughest nut to crack from a university administration’s perspective.

We absolutely celebrate the proliferation of dialogue across difference initiatives, but we worry that when you neglect viewpoint diversity, these initiatives can be an easy out that leads to a culture of niceness, which is not quite what we’re after. We should be polite and civil, but that often means expressing a viewpoint that you think is worth considering which makes other people uneasy. Doing open discourse in a serious way is not as easy as many of our universities are currently experiencing because they’re not doing the viewpoint diversity part well enough. Manners matter, but the university is sometimes rough and tumble, and that’s what it means to have a really, truly vigorous exchange of ideas.

🌪️If the political winds change in 2028, will the initiative to reform campus speech cultures lose steam when there’s less political pressure?

That’s a serious concern, at least insofar as these reforms we are seeing nationally are being driven by political expediency. We know power changes hands in Washington and state legislatures very often, and even when it doesn’t switch hands, embedding cultural change in a complex institution like a university doesn’t happen fast. Deep and lasting cultural change happens effectively only when it is built from the inside. You can have outside agents pushing to make things happen, and that can be helpful. But to have change be authentic and enduring, we think you need to have faculty members. Faculty members are there to stay. Students come for four years. Presidents come and go. But faculty are there for the long run. They have the opportunity through time to affect the culture of a place, which is why HxA really focuses on discovering faculty, recruiting them, and developing their understanding.

Politically speaking, HxA is trying to think through which elements that are being encouraged now are going to be taken away in two or three years. How can our movement endure beyond that and still make progress? We’re thinking about how to make great strides and recruit faculty during this three year window while the vibe shift is in the air. It’s also complicated by the fact that the Trump administration is pushing the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which we see as being a mixed bag. The fact that the phrase viewpoint diversity is now being associated with the Trump administration makes our job harder in many ways. Nonetheless, it’s a principle that we believe in.

🔄Are any universities really turning it around from having serious problems to a healthy culture of open discourse?

We’re still waiting to see about the turnarounds. There have been some places that were really bad where there are promising efforts at reform. I’m thinking, for example, of Columbia, which was one of the places where campus culture was at its worst and the anti-Semitism was explicit. They haven’t turned it around yet, and they have a long way to go, but there’s a very large and active group of HxA members on that faculty. There are also trustees who are in communication with us about things that can be done there.

There are also places that have been doing remarkable things for a number of years, because the presidents and the trustees sincerely believe in the principles of open discourse. Vanderbilt is the name everyone brings up, because Daniel Diermeier is such a great spokesperson for these things. Chicago, of course, has a strong tradition of true academic freedom. But there are also some surprising places. The University of Denver is a remarkable school where their chancellor, Jeremy Haefner, has been working on this stuff for five years or more. Long before it became fashionable to talk about open inquiry and constructive disagreement, he was building out specific programs for the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. He was measuring viewpoint diversity on campus and toleration for various ideas.

The University of Virginia has some really interesting initiatives going on as well. The interim president is an HxA member, and we have a big cohort there–I think 85 HxA members on the faculty. They do a huge number of events, including creative things like “disagree with a professor,” where they have a whole room of professors sitting at tables. Students sit down with the professors and the professor has to make a statement about something they believe, and the students criticize them for what they think. These kinds of things build those muscles that think through disagreements.

With all these initiatives happening around the country focused on constructive disagreement, we distinguish the campuses that are serious from the ones that are less serious primarily by asking: “Are they measuring these things?” If you commit to measuring open discourse indicators, then you get some longitudinal data. Without that you could just be doing an initiative because you’re doing it, and next year you might not do it anymore. But once you start measuring, then you can measure again when the administration changes or when the president changes. Measurement is really one of the key factors we think about in a healthy university environment.

This month, we focus on one student’s perspective on Furman’s climate for free speech and freedom of the press.

The following is an edited version of an exclusive interview with Carter Ozburn, the Editor-in-Chief of The Paladin.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

👋Tell me about yourself.

I’m Carter. I’m a Junior Political Science and Business Finance major and the Editor-in Chief of The Paladin newspaper. I’ve loved editing The Paladin and bringing student voices to a wider readership through formalized media, instead of platforms like social media or Yik Yak where discourse tends to be poorly thought through or inflammatory.

I’m also a member of the Riley Institute advanced team and an On Discourse student ambassador. Three members of The Paladin editorial board are student ambassadors for On Discourse, and we’re all very committed to fostering dialogue across differences. I know that’s a catch phrase, but it really is true—we are dedicated to bringing together folks from different backgrounds and who hold different opinions to have real conversations.

📰Tell me about The Paladin. What does it cover? What ideally is it doing for campus and for students?

We have six different sections: News, Opinions, Arts, Campus, and Culture, Sports, Knightlife—which is our newest section, a kind of column-based section with different forms of media—and The Horse, our satire section. The paper, of course, serves the student body, as well as the faculty, staff, and even the wider Greenville community. I know many people at The Post and Courier read our work. We had a Post and Courier investigative journalist come and speak to our editorial board two weeks ago.

Our Opinion section in particular reflects the views of the students, as well as the views of the Furman administration, alumni, or faculty that want to speak to students. It’s a way, especially in its print form, to communicate directly to students that’s unlike anything else on campus. Platforms like Yik Yak and social media typically consist of students talking to their own networks or friend groups in different niches of campus. I think we cut through that and play a crucial role in uniting students, or at least in getting them talking about certain campus and political issues.

🧭How do you approach news, what kind of news you’re looking for, and what perspective you’re trying to bring to it?

We cover Furman news, but we also pay attention to national news that disproportionately affects Furman students. We try to get creative with our news coverage—if a Cultural Life Program (CLP) touches on a controversial political issue, we’ll cover the CLP and the wider political issue at the same time.

We also strive to play a fact-checking role, and help inform students who might not know a lot of background going into or coming out of a certain CLP. We work to contextualize wider campus or administrational changes as well, situating them in their place on the national stage. Our primary goal is to educate students about Furman issues, while incorporating them into wider narratives when we can.

🏛️How does covering the administration go? Does the admin generally cooperate, or do you sometimes have to dig a little deeper than they’re willing to show you?

On the whole, the administration is not very cooperative. I hate saying that, and I wish they were more cooperative, because we’re not out to get them. They were extremely uncooperative, for example, when we were investigating the Bain consulting group last semester, really at every level. They’ve also been somewhat uncooperative regarding certain federal changes. Many students were looking for answers about the future of DEI or the future of international students on campus, and they offered none beyond the generalized statements issued to the student body.

I think the admin should be more accountable to student voices, but unfortunately their lack of accountability feels like the rule and not the exception.

🔍What undergirds the reluctance to be forthcoming with students? Is it a general reluctance, or is it case specific?

I think it’s often case specific. President Davis has been very cooperative with The Paladin and has been very supportive of our work, which I appreciate. I do think they’re concerned about admissions—they’re concerned that people on tours will pick up The Paladin and see writing critical of the school. Everyone at The Paladin loves Furman and I don’t think we’re critical just to be critical. We’re just trying to make it a better place.

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⚖️The Paladin is characterized as an independent student newspaper. What does that actually mean?

It means we’re student-run to a crazy degree, which I think is awesome. We have a lot of leeway budget-wise and advising-wise. I personally consult with a lot of advisors before publishing certain controversial pieces, but I think we have the kind of independence that allows us to bring to light things that we couldn’t otherwise about Furman and the administration. It especially allows our Opinion and News sections to flourish without waiting for any sort of administrative approval.

📜Why do you consult the administration on controversial pieces? Do they have any kind of veto power? Or is it just a precaution?

It’s more of a precaution. They’ve never expressed a veto of any article we’ve run. They’ve expressed criticisms of certain articles before, but they support student journalism as a whole, which I appreciate. I think they especially applaud our promoting discourse between different student groups and attempting to educate students on the wider campus culture, which I think is great.

💬What are some examples of back and forths in the opinion section on hot issues?

There are two articles in the works right now concerning President Davis’s email on the death of Charlie Kirk, which represent differing views. Last semester, particularly with the wider federal changes in higher education, if we had a piece arguing for one position, we tried to find someone to represent an opposing perspective. It’s important to us to create an opinion section that challenges both sides.

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🧠What disqualifies an article from being healthy and civil? What’s the difference between being controversial and being unhealthy?

Usually the only way we would disqualify an article for publication is if we thought it was not factual—if the writer was making claims that they were not backing up or attributing claims to sources that didn’t exist. Saying “an anonymous faculty member said this or that” won’t fly.

It can be difficult to determine what counts as facts and what qualifies as evidence. Though that can get into the weeds, I think it’s important to evaluate writers based on their own evidence. I think it’s particularly important today when people generally don’t fact check enough or provide sufficient evidence for their claims, especially on social media or in casual conversation about political topics. I think it’s an important role we play.

✍️When I was at Furman, I felt like the writing culture among the students was weak. Is there a poverty of writing at Furman?

I think there’s a poverty of writing across the nation. I worked in the House of Representatives this summer, and many of the interns were using artificial intelligence to generate their research and essays. And I was like “We’re at the House of Representatives! What are you doing?” The advent of AI and the decline of writing skills still boggles me sometimes.

At The Paladin, our organization is very top-down. Our editorial board operates at a completely different level and scale than our wider writer base. But I’ve always viewed that as on us as editors: it’s on us to recruit writers and get people excited. That was the impetus behind starting the Knightlife section and pursuing more columns, podcasts, and different forms of media. We want to capture more readership and in turn interest more people in writing.

🗣️How would you describe the speech climate on campus?

I think there are two ways people think of free speech on a college campus. One is to say, “Oh yes, free speech! I can say whatever I want. I’m constantly inundated with new ideas, I’m gaining critical thinking skills from my classes, and I’m focusing on discerning who I am. I might make some mistakes along the way, but I’m still gonna speak freely.”

The other dimension is this growing fear, especially among recent college graduates, that what they say is being closely monitored by everyone on social media, and maybe even by future employers. That really hurts The Paladin, especially concerning wider political issues. My fear when publishing controversial articles isn’t for The Paladin. It’s for me. I’m scared that I won’t get a job if I voice a particular opinion, whether it’s correct or not. That’s just very scary. I think a lot of students at Furman kind of feel that.

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🤝What impact is On Discourse having? Is it achieving its goals?

I think it’s having an impact, but I would like to see it expand. I’m in the first troop of student ambassadors, and I think that’s really good—there needs to be more student involvement. I think limiting On Discourse to CLPs only reaches a certain kind of student, which is just not the wider Furman population. We’re moving toward having public debates where we’d invite any student passing the library to come and debate certain political topics. That will be really good.

That said, it does seem that, especially on the more partisan or extremist ends of campus, it doesn’t resonate at all. I think many students, especially when talking about politics, are increasingly less inclined to consider the opposite opinion, especially around very controversial topics. Looking at Charlie Kirk’s death, for example, I saw many opinions that I viewed as extreme from people that I know and have never considered the inflammatory sort.

Resorting to making ad hominem attacks or slandering opponents’ character or credibility concerns me deeply. It’s going down a dark path. I think On Discourse is a really good way to fight that, but I don’t know if it’s gonna do all that much. It can’t fix the culture.

💥Do the extreme parties on campus look at On Discourse as a joke?

I mean, typically, they’re not very cooperative with On Discourse. They’re not very cooperative with The Paladin generally. They don’t want to be a part of our Opinion section. They view us as having no backbone, or being too empathetic or moderate. I think that’s a flaw that limits their audience to their own folks. They’re only preaching to the people that already support them, and not to people who might be swayed by their message.

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⚠️Do you think concerns over free speech at Furman have become overblown?

I would raise moderate concerns about the free speech climate. I think especially last semester and this semester in particular have been very concerning. The years before were less so. I think that the groups raising concerns are justified now, especially this semester. It’s just very hard to judge how you articulate those concerns. Different students in different partisan camps will disagree about how to approach the topic.

I do think that the fact that many different student groups voice these concerns, and the fact that On Discourse has gotten such legs and institutional support is very telling. These moves openly acknowledge that there’s a problem here that we need to fix in some way.

📉You said this semester has been worse than the last, and the last was worse than the one before. Could you elaborate on that?

The climate around controversy and campus dialogue has gotten a lot worse.

We’ve seen less support for certain political CLPs, and floundering support for our political articles throughout last semester. There was significant support for our work at the beginning, but when we tried to incorporate a lot of different opinions, we lost that support.

I’m definitely more worried now than last semester. Our opinion section is opening up at the same time that these wider political issues are becoming more divisive, and I’m worried that our writers will lack the desire to robustly defend their arguments and provide sufficient evidence, which won’t strengthen campus discourse.

🏫Do you detect any difference in the way students, faculty, and administrators approach these issues?

I think the administration pretty much stays out of free speech questions—they don’t do a lot outside of the On Discourse initiative or things like Riley and Tocqueville.

I think we’ve seen a really beneficial change in the way faculty treat certain issues, especially in their classrooms. There’s been a heightened commitment to bringing up differing opinions, and the discussion-based classes I’ve been in have been a lot better in the past few semesters, especially ones that tackle political issues. I think things like On Discourse, the Eberstadt situation, or even the wider Gen-Z atmosphere has elicited a really good faculty response. I think they’ve done a good job seeing that they need to serve as active moderators instead of opinionators, focus on facts rather than narratives, and pressure students to think for themselves.

💭Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I think that the people within the Furman community that are concerned about free speech are justified. I think that we all are responsible for the degradation of the speech climate. That means we’re responsible to fix it, and to make Furman a place where all students can feel empowered to think critically—to know how to think and not what to think. Students should be able to carry the amazing skills given by a liberal-arts education into their careers and into their lives without serious repercussions. They should be able to espouse ideas, in person or online, and not be instantly penalized for not having everything figured out when they’re 18 years old. That’s a wider national issue, but I think at Furman, we can be better than that.

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This month, we focus on how Furman engages with alumni! The following is an edited version of an exclusive interview with Ford Riddle, Furman’s new director of Alumni Engagement.

We hope you enjoy the insight.

Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman?

I'm the director of Alumni Engagement here at Furman. Before this position, I was senior director of development and unit lead for the College of Engineering at Clemson. Before that, I was vice president at United Way of Greenville County. Before that, I was director of major gifts at Furman, so I spent the bulk of my time in major gifts fundraising. Eventually, I moved more into engagement with United Way, and then at Clemson, I did both. I'm delighted to be on the engagement side for Furman now.

I graduated from Furman in 2012 and majored in political science. I absolutely loved my time here. My experience was somewhat unique—I had a single mom who was terminally ill at the time, and I really owe a lot to my professors, friends, and folks who worked in administration who checked in on me and helped get me across the finish line at Furman. It was a big call for me to come back to Furman. This is a special place that did a lot for me. I'm not just doing this as a job—Furman is a place I believe in, and I want to give my time back and see Furman prosper in the years to come.

You've been an alum for 13 years. What was your experience of alumni engagement from the alum side? What do you think Furman did well, and where do you want to push for improvement?

I think one of Furman’s main strengths is its organic community. I'll focus on our professors as an example. You have professors at Furman who could be at R1 institutions or at other places more focused on research, and perhaps making more money.

Instead, they're choosing to be at Furman because they really care about the student experience. They're not just academic mentors, they're life mentors all the way around. Both as an alum and during my fundraising period, it always came back to those relationships. They’re our strength. If you talk to folks at other colleges, they just don't have that kind of ingrained culture and experience.

I think we can improve by listening to alumni, creating a more deliberate structure to connect alums to Furman now, and helping alums reengage in a way that's meaningful for them. We need to be more proactive — not just waiting for alumni to come to us. We need to talk to alumni, and see how we can connect them in a meaningful way.

What does that look like concretely? What programs or opportunities are there going to be for alumni?

Right now we're doing an audit internally of our office with all of our touch points and meeting with our campus partners to see what outreach they have, so that my team and I can look at the big picture.

In our office specifically, we're looking not just at increasing the number of alumni who come to events or show up for Homecoming. We’re looking to make meaningful connections. When I say meaningful connections, I mean engaging alumni who are having a meaningful impact on the student experience, recruiting students to come to Furman, or helping recent grads as they enter the world.

Then there is our digital strategy and our outreach strategy. We have a lot of areas to improve digitally. We've always communicated to our alumni the same way across the board: no matter what you care about, no matter what class year you were. We have a lot of opportunities to be much more specific and targeted about what people want to hear about. Is it the Health Sciences? Politics and International Affairs? Is it Tocqueville? That's great! Let's make sure people are connected in a way that makes sense for them. Regionally, we want events that have some tie-in to what's going on at Furman.

What do you want to see from alumni? What does the ideal alumni look like?

Like I mentioned before, we want alumni who are meaningfully engaged. We want to see people who are serving as officers in regional groups, mentoring students, or helping grads get their first job.

Engagement matters because when alumni are more engaged, it affects the university in a number of ways. For one, alumni are our greatest advocates within the community. They're much more likely to recommend Furman to prospective students. Also, they're more likely to be philanthropic if they're informed about and actively invested in Furman. It's important for us to build a strong network and affinity. That’s how a liberal arts schools and small colleges thrive. And the students—both current and prospective—know that they're not just getting a good education, but they're entering a really strong network.

In your mind, what is the role for alumni advocacy for the direction of the university?

When you graduate from Furman, you’re a Furman grad for life. So in terms of advocacy, I think it would help if we can increase our transparency. We have survey data that shows that alumni who feel like they are more informed look more positively at Furman and are more engaged with the institution. So, I would really say it really does start with our office and making sure we're being super transparent and putting information out about what's going on at Furman. We also need to be available to take calls and emails, hear from people, understand how they want to be involved, and answer their questions. The better informed people are, the more confident they will feel in asking questions.

I think we can also improve on telling stories that matter about what's going on at Furman, pulling back the curtain to say, ”here's what's happening.” Then the next layer to that is figuring out what people care about. This is a good segway. Alumni will receive an email from me in the next few weeks where they will be able to choose how they want to interact with the institution and what kind of content they want to receive. We will start releasing Dins Digest weekly to our alumni, and hopefully increase our transparency with the community.

Recently Fitch downgraded Furman’s credit outlook and many alumni, particularly donors, are concerned about Furman fiscal future. Broadly, is there anything you want to say about Furman's financial outlook, the confidence that alumni should have and in Furman’s stability, and how that should inform their willingness to give?

I'm not at capacity to speak for the financial future, but I will say this: I know a lot about what's going on, and knew a lot about what was going on before I accepted this role. I would not have

accepted this role if I thought that Furman couldn't survive until its third century.

I really do believe that the alumni network is one of the key aspects to assist with securing Furman’s future—building that strong network and helping with enrollment. I believe that this office, in partnership with the rest of the university, has a key role to play in achieving these long-term goals. I have full faith in the folks in leadership; full faith in the Alumni Board and the Young Alumni Council. There are a lot of folks who are ready to take on the challenges of this new, tough environment for higher ed. We're going to come out of this thriving.

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Could you provide more information about the regional groups?

Our strategy previously has been, if somebody wants to start a group, great, we’ll help them. What our office is doing now is trying to flip that script.

Starting with Greenville as an example: their team's doing a tremendous job. They have planned their entire year. They're very proactive. We’re trying to help them by providing data on the ages, class years, and occupations of Greenville-based alumni. We also let them know where people live specifically, so they can think about doing more events in Taylors or Simpsonville, for example, since there are a lot of alums beyond Greenville’s borders. We're doing that with Atlanta and Charlotte as well.

D.C. is a great example where we can do more programming that matches with folks that work in the public policy or lobbying world. There are a lot of young alumni in DC, so it warrants doing more networking events and young alumni events. And, of course, we try to keep up events that support and follow athletics.

If readers are interested in getting more meaningfully engaged, where should they go to find out more about that?

For the short term, you can email me or email alumni@furman.edu. We will certainly plug you in. If you want to help with students, we can connect you with one, and you can help them with anything they need, be it the rigor of first-year Furman or helping with resumes.

What I'm working on right now with our team is a reset of our website that will allow people to click and say, “this is how I want to be involved,” and “this is where I live.” If you live in Atlanta, you can go to the Atlanta tab and see the upcoming events. People can also use Furman Connects. That can be a great place to start.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

Over the next year, expect a lot of new things from us. Also, shameless plug: come to Homecoming! On Saturday, we'll have the football and soccer games. On Sunday, we're going to be playing the University of Alabama in basketball. But there's going to be a lot of cool new stuff as well. Like, on the website, people can sign up if they want to go on a run with the Health Science Department or play golf. We want people to feel the nostalgia and build connections.

I also welcome feedback from the alumni. We want alumni to have an experience with Furman and to mentor and help Furman students in a way that is crafted to make the most sense for them.

This month, we focus on On Discourse, an initiative Furman launched in Fall 2023 to support dialogue across differences, rebuild trust, and foster a campus culture where disagreement is not just tolerated—but embraced.

The following is an edited version of an exclusive interview with Dr. Brent Nelsen, Jane Fishburne Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Tocqueville Center. Dr. Nelsen also served as co-chair of On Discourse during the 2024–25 academic year.

We hope you enjoy the insight. But first,:

*Editor’s note: You may have noticed that several of our recent posts appeared in your inbox under the names of individual authors (like Evan Myers or Jeff Salmon) instead of the Furman Free Speech Alliance. That was a technical oversight on our part, and we apologize for any confusion.

Moving forward, all of our communications will come clearly labeled from: Furman Free Speech Alliance.

Thank you for reading and for supporting free expression at Furman.

What Is On Discourse? 🎯

On Discourse is an initiative created by President Davis to highlight the ways Furman supports viewpoint diversity, and to address areas where it falls short. The goal is simple: promote “discussion across difference.”

What Does On Discourse Do? 🛠️

• We're focused on curricular initiatives—courses—that have On Discourse elements. An instructor has to meet a certain set of criteria for a course to count as an On Discourse class. Instructors have to spend class time encouraging discussion across differences. For example, Dr. Liz Smith (politics) taught an entire course on civil discourse last spring.

• CLPs (cultural life program) now allow you to add On Discourse as a co-sponsor, if your program incorporates some obvious element of discussion across difference. What we really encourage is having a part of the CLP dedicated to students talking to each other after hearing a range of views on anything from tariffs to the DOGE effort.

• We have an advisory council consisting predominantly of faculty members, and an On Discourse Student Ambassador Council which draws members from student organizations. Both are useful for gathering community feedback and testing new ideas. The Student Ambassadors will be taking On Discourse into the student organizations in creative ways.

What Problems Was On Discourse Meant to Address? 🚨

There were several free-speech controversies in the spring of 2023 involving guest speakers Scott Yenor and Mary Eberstadt, which attracted attention from alumni and donors. I think a lot of the information communicated publicly about the controversies was not entirely correct, with some of those involved framing the facts in the worst possible light, but still, it touched a nerve of a very real free-speech problem at Furman.

What Needs to Happen to Foster a Wider Culture of Free Speech? 🌱

1. First, we need to increase awareness among the students. Most have probably heard about On Discourse, but not enough know what it is or what it does.

2. Second, and most important, we need to get conservative students—students who know their ideas buck the progressive ideology that dominates liberal-arts campuses—feeling comfortable enough to speak their minds. We have lots of survey data now on how our students perceive the openness of culture on campus—the culture is accepting of progressive identity groups

   (LGBTQ, racial minorities, but the culture is not always welcoming of conservatives. Conservatives feel least comfortable. There's slight progress in that area, but we haven't seen dramatic progress yet.

How Do More Progressive Faculty Feel About On Discourse? 🤔

I think it's important to say that there is some low-level opposition to On Discourse from the progressive side because they don't like the origin story. The biggest hurdle we face among progressives is the charge that the program came from pressure from right-wing donors. That the president is just reacting, and, in the end, it will undermine efforts toward justice for oppressed groups.

That said, many of my very progressive colleagues have noted this data about conservative students—because the evidence is clear—and they say they are trying very hard to make their classrooms open to conservative ideas. When we talk to students, they believe that professors are encouraging and would not penalize conservative views. They're more concerned about their peers. They're concerned about social media, they're concerned about Yik Yak, and they're concerned about being shunned.

There is, again, good survey evidence that says that progressive students are more likely to cut off relationships with conservative students and don't want conservative friends, whereas conservatives know they’re coming to a campus that isn't going to be that supportive, and seem more willing to be friends with anybody.

For most of my progressive colleagues, the idea that Furman is inhospitable to conservative students is embarrassing. Unfortunately, some of them embrace it. This is where the most progressive elements can really dampen free speech. I have been in groups where people will say, “I don't want to talk to somebody who undermines my dignity, who questions my identity.”

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What Are the Biggest Risks That Could Torpedo On Discourse? ⚠️

I think the big risks are fairly obvious from other campuses.

• A political issue—the one I would think most likely to cause real problems would be the Palestinian issue, along with the question of anti-Semitism—can become so divisive as to make conversation extremely difficult. (By the way, we have some big donors who are concerned about anti-Semitism on campus. These people would not be considered conservative at all, but they're concerned about that particular issue.) If political tensions got so high that we couldn’t really talk anymore to one another, that would undermine On Discourse. And frankly, at Furman, we really haven't opened the Israel/Gaza/Palestine conversation very much. We had a couple of vigils early on in the war, but last year was really quiet.

• The other thing, as I mentioned before, is identity issues. That's where the culture war gets really hot, but people tend to avoid those issues. It's much easier to discuss across differences when you're talking about climate change or vaccines. I think we can deal with a lot of the culture-war issues, but the most emotional ones—those are the things that keep me awake at night.

Is There Anything Else You’d Like to Say? 💭

The other big concern I have is apathy among conservative students. Those who just aren’t interested in sticking their necks out by engaging on these issues. They decide to play a different role on campus than at home to avoid controversy. Or they're just not that interested in engaging on political topics. I think that will be a main obstacle to the success of On Discourse.

I applaud the administration for going out and actually opposing some of the most progressive groups on campus and really sticking to their guns. If things get really heated though, the administration’s reaction might be different. I don't think it's been tested yet. I'm hopeful and I'm encouraged—I think Furman could really be a place where these things happen. But I still think it's early years yet.