Qualla: Furman University

Furman University: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greengrass090, Public domain. Charles Hard Townes earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Furman in 1935. Thirty years later he won the Nobel Prize for inventing the maser, the microwave amplification device whose principles directly led to the development of the laser. He liked to tell the story that the idea for the maser came to him on a park bench in Washington, DC, after a frustrating meeting. He had been a Furman undergraduate at age eighteen, the youngest in his class, and he traced his interest in physics back to a Furman professor who taught quantum mechanics as if it were a foreign language he expected his students to speak fluently. That kind of teaching ambition, undersized faculty pushing oversized ideas, is part of what Furman has always done well. It is also part of why a small Baptist college in upstate South Carolina has produced twenty Truman Scholars, several Rhodes Scholars, and a Nobel laureate.

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Image: Greengrass090 | Public domain

Furman University: Founded in 1826, Closed in 1834

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greengrass090, Public domain. Furman opened in 1826, named for Richard Furman, the Baptist pastor in Charleston whose denomination had been pushing for an educated ministry. For its first quarter-century the institution was constantly on the edge of insolvency. Average enrollment through 1850 was about ten st...

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Image: Greengrass090 | Public domain

Furman University: Desegregation, the Hard Way

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greengrass090, Public domain. The story of Furman's desegregation is not a story of an institution gracefully ahead of its time. When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Furman, like nearly every white Southern college, did not admit Black students. Some students wanted to change th...

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Image: Greengrass090 | Public domain

Furman University: The Most Beautiful Campus, Sort Of

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. Furman moved to its current 750-acre campus, five miles north of downtown Greenville, in 1958. The campus was designed around a lake, with a Bell Tower at one end and rolling lawns leading down to the water. USA Today called Furman the fourth most beautiful campus in America in 2...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain

Furman University: Who Came Out of Here

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scott Catron from Sandy, Utah, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. The list of Furman graduates is unexpectedly long for a university of 2,500 students. Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate physicist. Herman W. Lay, the founder of Frito-Lay potato chips. Richard Riley, the U.S. Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton and former governor of South...

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Image: Scott Catron from Sandy, Utah, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0