Furman’s New Strategic Plan Features Failed DEI Policies

By the Furman Free Speech Alliance

This piece first appeared on the Furman Free Speech Alliance substack page — please subscribe here — and is republished with permission.

Furman President Elizabeth Davis recently rolled out “FUture Focused,” the school’s strategic plan for 2024-2029. 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.

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