✉️ Dear President Davis (August 2025)
Has Furman Changed its Politicized Hiring Practices?
August 11, 2025
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
We wish you all the best as you welcome students back to campus and participate in orientation for the class of 2029.
I write this month with a question: Has Furman changed its faculty hiring practices? As FFSA has argued in considerable detail on our website and in a previous open letter to you, Furman’s requirement that applicants for faculty positions submit mandatory diversity statements is a political litmus test that amounts to compelled speech. It violates fundamental free speech rights and restricts Furman’s ability to attract high-caliber candidates by prioritizing adherence to DEI ideology over academic excellence.
Your Dean of Faculty, Jeremy Cass, is on record in an email stating that Furman has no plans to change this requirement.
However, contrast an announcement posted last year for an Assistant/Associate Professor of Accounting with an opening for a tenure-track computer scientist posted just a few weeks ago.
Last year, Furman required:
“a diversity statement which describes how the candidate's teaching, scholarship, mentoring, and/or service might contribute to a liberal arts college community that includes a commitment to diversity as one of its core values (see https://www.furman.edu/diversity-equity-inclusion/)....”
Today, a candidate must submit:
“a letter of interest, C.V., statement of teaching philosophy, statement of research, and complete contact information for three references. The statement of teaching philosophy should describe your inclusive teaching and mentoring efforts, broadly conceived, and how your teaching and mentoring may contribute to a liberal arts and sciences community that aims, among other things, to “honor inquiry, promote diversity, [and] strive for equity” (FUture Focused).”
It seems that Furman has at least abandoned the required DEI statement in favor of more legitimate concerns, such as teaching philosophy and research interests, along with how the candidate’s teaching would “honor inquiry, promote diversity, and strive for equity.”
Plus, candidates are now prompted to seek guidance from your strategic plan — FUture Focused — rather than DEI pages on Furman’s website.
That was a necessary change since those DEI pages no longer exist; one of the many behind-the-scenes alterations made to soften the harder edges of Furman’s unambiguous adherence to DEI ideology.
Nevertheless, I want to applaud you. Abandoning the required DEI statement for hiring and assigning the DEI web pages to the memory hole are steps in the right direction. You should announce this publicly and take the credit that you deserve.
Still, the demand for candidates to explain how their teaching philosophy contributes to a community that “honors inquiry, promotes diversity, [and] strive for equity,” is a clear signal that Furman remains wedded to the politically loaded language of diversity and equity. Especially after consulting FUture Focus, candidates will know what they must write — and must not write — to fit into Furman’s DEI pigeonhole.
It is long past time for Furman to completely abandon this policy and adopt a better approach. It would help, for example, if Furman inserted a specific request in the job description for candidates to explain how they would contribute to viewpoint diversity. This would be a way to ensure that the faculty becomes a body dedicated to free speech and rigorous questioning of stifling orthodoxies.
Another issue, which I intend to take up in a future Open Letter, is how these hiring conditions square with your faculty’s statement, The Lines Furman Must Not Cross, which argues that Furman “exists not to serve ideology, but to pursue truth through open, critical, and disciplined inquiry.” Doesn’t a compulsory pledge to a particular political viewpoint contradict these sentiments?
A year ago, we wrote that “An excellent first step” for your administration would be “getting rid of mandatory DEI statements and adopting apolitical hiring policies.”
Furman has done the former. It has work to do on the latter.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance
*Editor’s note: One quick correction from our Belltower Times last week.
We wrote that Furman got “downgraded.” But a downgrade is an actual rating change, different from a change in outlook. So, it was inaccurate to say that Furman got a "downgrade." But a rating change will follow if Furman doesn't improve its enrollment metrics.
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