Dear President Davis (October 2025)
Can Furman build on these two positive steps?
October 14, 2025
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsette Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
The Furman Free Speech Alliance is looking forward to greeting you at our Homecoming tailgate tent, where we are offering top-rated Henry’s BBQ and a warm greeting from friendly campus free-speech advocates before the Paladins take on the Bulldogs. Really, we mean it! Please stop by!
We are also looking forward to the Friday Tocqueville CLP, 'The Crisis in American Higher Education,' featuring former Senator Ben Sasse, John Tomasi, President of the Heterodox Academy, and you. The FFSA will be there to show its support for what we hope will be a vigorous grappling with hard questions.
Hard questions. That is what The Tocqueville Center for the Study of Democracy and Society specializes in asking, and that is what political theory is all about. It is what Furman should strive not just to accommodate, but to encourage. More than that, Furman needs to be more welcoming of the answers one gets from asking hard questions.
The latest survey of Furman students by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which FFSA has covered extensively, demonstrates that your students are fearful of speaking up. These findings are virtually identical to those over the last two years. But Furman has shown no interest in the problem of student self-censorship.
Madam President, it often feels as if FFSA is talking to a brick wall about the dangers of a monochromatic political atmosphere on campus.
Nevertheless, you have recently taken two steps that offer hope of a greater openness to viewpoint diversity.
First, Furman has posted a position for a tenure-track professor in classical liberal thought, who will also serve as assistant director of the Tocqueville Center. The Center has needed this position for years, and the students have required that professor in classical thought. Without the full support of the administration, the Center will never be able to resist forces on the faculty that seek to crush the study of political theory and the Center’s “intellectual community devoted to seeking the truth about the moral and philosophic questions at the heart of political life.”
We applaud this posting, which demonstrates your support for the Center's goals.
Second, as I have noted more than once, Dean of the Faculty Jeremy Cass informed me exactly a year ago that Furman has no intention of abandoning its required diversity, equity, and inclusion statement for faculty hiring. Fortunately, however, that statement has been largely eliminated.
In a recent letter to you, I noted this change and the positive effects it will have on recruiting the very best faculty. When recruitment is politicized, it prioritizes adherence to an ideology over the best interests of the students. It is welcome that in this recruitment for a position with the Tocqueville Center – as with other faculty postings – ideological litmus tests have been largely, if not entirely, removed.
Regrettably, recruitments still include politicized buzz words, as you ask “candidates to explain how their teaching philosophy contributes to a community that 'honors inquiry, promotes diversity, [and] strives for equity.” Why not just ask 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.
Still, these are two steps for which Furman can justly take credit.
Can you build on these steps? Here are two ideas.
Challenge your administration and faculty, maybe even ask your Bain Capital consultants, to identify specific policies and programs that will make Furman a nationally recognized leader in campus free speech and the standard for free and vigorous inquiry in scholarship and teaching.
Monthly, have private discussions with a few students on the topic of campus free speech and student self-censorship. Use Chatham House Rules; students will appreciate that you have trusted them to follow the Chatham House guidelines, and it will demonstrate your openness to listening to their voices. And I wager, you will learn a great deal.
Looking forward to seeing you at Homecoming.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance
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