While Furman University is now religiously independent, its Baptist heritage defines the school. Furman was founded in 1826 by the South Carolina Baptist Convention and named for the prominent preacher and southern independence activist Richard Furman. When Furman University broke formal ties with the Baptist convention 166 years later, some alumni and professors feared that this move would mark the beginning of the school’s secularization—sending it down the worldly path to prestige already trod by Duke, Vanderbilt, and Emory, all of which started out as similarly faith-based initiatives.

Indeed, over the past two decades, Furman has risen steadily in reputation; once an excellent regional university, Furman is now one of the top liberal arts schools in the nation. Happily, it still maintains many of the things that have made it stand out, such as a strong religious tradition, close faculty-student interaction, and a true liberal arts curriculum. Students hail from forty-seven states and twenty-seven foreign countries, but the college draws a little less than one-third of its students from the state of South Carolina and around 75 percent from the Southeast. Perhaps that is one reason Furman has retained a unique atmosphere and fairly traditional orientation. In fact, if the reports of students and professors here can be trusted, Furman is one of the friendliest schools included in this guide.