March 9, 2026
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
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.”
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.”
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.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President,
Furman Free Speech Alliance
Apologies for the duplicate message; the previous one was sent in error.
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Excellent article, Jeff. Hold the faculty accountable for their hypocrisy. Agreeing to noble sounding intellectual diversity statements means nothing if they are only empathetic to their own political philosophies.
Keep up the great work you and FFSA are doing!
Tom Neale
Chair
The Alumni Free Speech Alliance