Dear President Davis (February 2026)

We have important lessons to learn from Furman's past.

February 9, 2026
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsette Highway
Greenville, SC 29613

Dear Elizabeth:

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

---

---

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

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

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

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

---

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

---

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

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

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

Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance

---