Furman Free Speech Round-Up (January)
For Paladins and Friends
Welcome to our January newsletter.
The Furman Free Speech Alliance is a group of alumni, parents, and friends concerned about Furman University’s deteriorating campus climate for free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.
Each month, we update you on what’s happening at Furman and what actions we’re taking to defend free speech on campus.
Looking Back:
2024 was an eventful year. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl (again). Elon Musk launched a rocket into space and landed it back on Earth. Taylor Swift won the Grammy for album of the year! Far more important than all of that, though, 2024 was the year the Furman Free Speech Alliance was founded.
We’ve had a remarkable year, thanks to readers like you.
In early Spring, we started as just a handful of alumni looking to make a difference at our alma mater. Not even a year later, we’ve grown in numbers, energy, and influence.
Today, we have:
141 subscribers
2,000 Substack readers
An open rate of nearly 65%
Hundreds of dollars in monthly pledges
Dozens of Paladin parents, faculty, and students reaching out in support of our mission
We’ve also gotten results. This year, Furman adopted a new statement on freedom of inquiry and expression. The university also launched the On Discourse initiative, which aims to teach students about the importance of political dialogue. The Post & Courier even published an article from one of our members highlighting how Furman’s DEI commitments suppress free speech and make the university’s faculty worse.
These developments give us hope and encourage us to continue working hard to improve Furman. We’re not slowing down in 2025. With the help of our new advisory board, which includes Paladin parents and alumni from across the political spectrum, we’ll continue to advocate for academic excellence instead of woke mediocrity and defend the First Amendment on Furman’s campus.
We hope you will join us!
One Stat You Should Know:
We’ve had more than 11,500 views on our Substack this year! Thank you for reading our page.
Looking Ahead:
President Davis recently rolled out “FUture Focused,” Furman’s strategic plan for 2024-2029.
Of course, no one should expect too much from a big strategic document like this, but even still, we're disappointed.
Setting aside the fact that the entire thing reads like a focus group selected each word, there are some glaring problems with President Davis’ plans for the future.
The most glaring and obvious is that:
Furman’s strategic plan for our third century… reaffirms the commitment to competitive faculty and staff salaries and diversity and inclusion as specified in previous strategic plans.
In other words, Furman intends to continue implementing its counterproductive and anti-free speech hiring policies for the next five years. We’ve written extensively about this issue and urged the administration to reconsider its position, but clearly, they aren’t getting the message.
That’s a shame because, over time, these policies are making Furman’s faculty less politically diverse and less talented. In a competitive market with an enrollment cliff looming, can Furman afford not to make changes for another five years?
Time will tell, of course, but other elite schools like MIT and Harvard are already abandoning these policies, and national trends suggest that DEI’s days dominating higher education are numbered.
From what we can tell, many in the Furman community oppose these policies. One of our most popular posts to date was an article we penned explaining why Furman’s DEI pledges need to go, and we frequently hear from parents, students, and faculty that they can’t stand these policies.
To be clear, if Furman’s administration intends to honor its own stated values and “steadfastly protect freedom of inquiry and hold ourselves to high standards of excellence and integrity,” then it needs to drop these DEI policies immediately.
Until they do, the university will be stuck in the past, not focused on the FUture.
In the Network:
Six states, including Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas and Utah, banned or limited DEI at colleges and universities in 2024.
It is time for South Carolina’s legislators to step up and do the same.