Dear President Davis (January 2026)
The lack of viewpoint diversity on campus is a major roadblock to achieving what Furman wants to achieve.
January 12, 2026
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613
Dear Elizabeth:
Happy New Year. This is the bicentennial year for Furman. There is much to celebrate and much to reflect upon. The FFSA looks forward to all the plans that seek out alumni participation.
I would like to begin the year with some reflections on the idea of “a whole campus culture of open inquiry,” a phrase drawn from Heterodox President John Tomasi, who joined you at the Tocqueville Forum in October and a gave a subsequent interview with the FFSA.
For a campus to support a culture of open inquiry it needs three elements says Tomasi: “First, it [needs] protections for the free exchange of ideas. Second, it [needs] a variety of viewpoints on the campus — among the faculty, students, administration, and trustees. Third, it [needs] constructive disagreement.”
One element alone is insufficient. Indeed, a campus with two of the elements, no matter how robust and imbued with institutional support they might be, will fail to build “the conditions for scholarship” at a university.
Why?
Because “if you have a university that has formal protection for the free exchange of ideas, but everyone there thinks pretty much the same way, you don’t have viewpoint diversity. If you formally protect the free exchange of ideas and you have a variety of viewpoints on the campus, but the viewpoints are all balkanized into the different groups so people aren’t listening to each other, you don’t have constructive disagreement.”
On a campus where free speech is encouraged, where there are true differences of opinion, and where disagreement is looked upon as constructive, there you have what Tomasi calls a “magical process” that creates a culture of open inquiry.
Of the three, the hardest to create is viewpoint diversity.
We know this at Furman.
Your excellent Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Free Expression demonstrated Furman’s commitment to the first element, a culture of open inquiry through the protection of free speech. Your creation of On Discourse addresses the issue of constructive discourse by teaching skills such as active listening. Taken together, these are critical steps toward creating a campus culture of open inquiry.
But without viewpoint diversity, notes Tomasi, “‘civil dialogue’ risks becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial.”
And he insists that in a monochromatic political environment, speech can be very free and dialogue can be very civil, but real inquiry can be completely sterile.
Concerns about Furman’s homogeneous political culture were a key reason we created the FFSA. (See our Mission Statement) The Paladin’s own reporting, along with a recent survey by City Journal, finds that the faculty is far less politically diverse than the student body.
The reason this matters lies at the core of what the university stands for.
As Tomasi has written:
“the goal is not ‘balance’ for its own sake. It is to rebuild the conditions for scholarship: conditions in which bad ideas lose because better evidence comes to light, not because they are invisible (or unutterable); conditions in which students and faculty learn to evaluate arguments they dislike, not just perform tolerance; conditions in which disciplines remain curious enough to notice what they have stopped noticing.”
The lack of viewpoint diversity on campus is a major roadblock to achieving what Furman wants to achieve -- a campus culture of open inquiry.
Are there ways to address this problem? I offer two, admittedly tentative, thoughts at this point.
That you lead a forum on viewpoint diversity, through On Discourse or the Tocqueville Project, or both. Presidents at other universities also struggle with this issue. Invite them to campus, along with your faculty, students, administrators, trustees, and alumni, to analyze the problem and explore potential solutions.
As I mentioned in my last letter to you, the Furman Magazine can challenge alumni to give serious thought to campus issues. Invite Furman professors or write scholarly essays for the magazine on the topic of viewpoint diversity and the mission of the university. This would be an excellent way to start working through this issue, while bringing the expertise of your alumni to bear on this vexing problem.
All the best for the New Year,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance