Furman Free Speech Round-Up (May 2025)
Evaluating the faculty's statement on "The Lines Furman Must Not Cross" and wondering what President Elizabeth Davis's legacy will be.
Welcome to our May 2025 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:
Previously, we’ve reported that the Trump administration is ramping up pressure on schools like Furman to abandon DEI and other policies that impede free speech and hinder academic excellence. And we’ve asked how Furman plans to respond to these changes.
This month, we got a major hint on how Furman’s faculty plan to respond. On April 23, the faculty released a resolution titled “The Lines Furman Must not Cross” that criticized the “growing political pressures” seeking to “narrow institutional autonomy, restrict academic freedom, and suppress open discourse” and called on Furman’s leadership to “continue to support policies that safeguard expression, uphold human dignity, and foster inclusive dialogue.” These policies include “academic freedom” and “free inquiry,” and the statement even made it clear that “offense is not a sufficient justification for censorship.”
As Furman’s first and only alumni free speech organization, we are certainly encouraged by the faculty’s aspiration to place a greater emphasis on “academic freedom” and “free inquiry.” As we have said time and again, these are admirable principles that all serious universities should aspire to maintain at the core of the academic enterprise. However, while we support the aspirations of this resolution, we also feel the need to provide important context for our readers:
The resolution was pushed through by a small group of radical DEI activists on Furman’s faculty and is not representative of how many faculty feel about this issue.
While the “Lines Furman Must not Cross” resolution did receive official backing — meaning it was approved by half the faculty — that does not mean that all of Furman’s faculty members, or even an overwhelming majority of them, are in favor of it.
The resolution did not go through the customary process of consideration and approval.
Important items like this are typically put on the agenda for a faculty meeting at least one week in advance. And truly important issues are often given an airing in one meeting and then voted on in the next meeting to ensure that faculty have enough time to deliberate. The faculty pushing this resolution through did not do that. Instead, they added this item to the agenda only a few hours in advance of the meeting, preventing the possibility of any kind of organized opposition that might oppose their efforts or propose amendments to the statement.
The resolution champions academic freedom and free inquiry, but it fails to offer any reflection on how Furman has failed to live up to these values.
The resolution claims that in the face of “growing political pressure… Furman’s leadership must continue to support policies that safeguard expression, uphold human dignity, and foster inclusive dialogue.” But the faculty don’t acknowledge any of the ways that Furman has already failed to live up to that mission.
For example, they don’t make any mention of the fact that the administration has punished faculty for questioning DEI and imposed DEI-based litmus tests on new hires and on existing faculty seeking pay rises, tenure, and promotion. That DEI activists on campus have engaged in vicious defamation, in “cancel culture”, and in outright bullying to bring the faculty into line. That these same ideologues have called for the administration to investigate every faculty member’s private political affiliations and root out those who hold “unacceptable” views. Or that these developments have created a climate of fear and self-censorship among students and faculty alike.
This context is important because it reveals the true purpose of the radical subset of the faculty who advanced this resolution: to use academic freedom and free expression to co-opt Furman’s administration into defending the pro-DEI status quo from any external intervention, no matter the cost.
However, the administration can avoid being co-opted — and better fend off external intervention — simply by taking the resolution at its word, cutting DEI, and prioritizing policies that advance academic freedom and improve the campus climate for free speech.
For example, the administration could invest more in pre-existing programs like “On Discourse” or the “Tocqueville Fellows” that advance reflection and political dialogue. Likewise, it can and should make cuts to DEI across the board and get rid of mandatory DEI statements for new hires, as we’ve called for repeatedly. Finally, Furman could create an event series that specifically focuses on the importance of free speech — indeed, the Furman Free Speech Alliance would happily co-sponsor and pay speaker fees.
Pursuing any of these ideas would be a good step forward. Using the rhetoric of free speech to defend the DEI status quo is a step back.
One Fact You Should Know:
According to a new survey from The Paladin, more than half of independents on campus disapprove of President Davis’s leadership. You can see the full results here.
Looking Ahead:
The truth is that June is a pretty quiet month at Furman. Some students are on campus, but most are back home or doing summer internships. So, we decided we’d look way ahead… to 2030.
Why? Because just last year, President Davis received a contract extension to remain the President of Furman until 2030. She started serving in 2014, and assuming she stays until the end of her contract, that means she will have been Furman's president for 16 years.
This would make her tenure the fourth longest in Furman’s long history, tied with Charles Manly and David Shi (both of whom served 16 years). She is only surpassed by John Edwin Johns (who served for 18 years), James Clement Furman himself (who served for 20 years), and John Laney Plyler (who served for 25 years).
In other words, by 2030 Elizabeth Davis will be one of the longest serving and most consequential presidents in Furman’s history. That doesn’t mean we need to go ahead and put her on our proverbial Mount Rushmore today, but at the very least we should start asking ourselves what her legacy will be. And we should start asking her what she wants it to be.
Will we remember her for the Furman Advantage? For the stability and fortitude she displayed in helping Furman survive the COVID-19 pandemic? Maybe we will just remember that she was President when Furman beat Virginia that one time in March Madness!
Or perhaps it will be for something even more significant, like shepherding Furman through this tumultuous time in our politics and helping the university emerge as a national leader in defending free speech and teaching students how to engage in serious, curious, and bi-partisan dialogue about the most important questions of our day.
That would be a remarkable legacy indeed.
In the Network:
We love Furman, and this month we want to highlight one awesome example of the kind of dialogue we want to see more of. Here, you can read an interview on “populism, universities, and the future of democracy” that the Tocqueville Program conducted with Eric Kauffman, Professor of Politics at The University of Buckingham. He digs into how the Trump administration is paying more attention to universities these days and argues that “external government intervention is probably necessary.”