There is a passage in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography that business professor Rachel Ferguson never forgets. Douglass describes how, when he was a slave, his owner’s wife started teaching him to read. When Douglass’s owner found out, he was furious and “proceeded to unfold to his wife the true philosophy of the slave system,” Douglass writes. The owner told his wife that teaching Douglass to read the Bible would make him “unfit for slavery forever.”
“It was in that moment that Douglass determined to learn to read, and ultimately to free himself from bondage entirely,” Ferguson says. “Education is necessary for a free citizen who will run his or her own life and who will help create the life of the community.”
Douglass’s message that education liberates one from ignorance and poverty continues to inspire Ferguson’s work. She is the Director of the Center for Free Enterprise at Concordia University in Chicago, where she teaches business ethics. She is also an affiliate scholar at the Acton Institute, which has been hosting Concordia faculty and students at Acton University, as well as a Fellow at the Center for Social Flourishing. “There’s no better way for me to introduce my colleagues and students to this world of Christian classical liberalism than at Acton University,” Ferguson says. “And they have been really impressed, educated, and energized by the experience!”
Most students at Concordia come from minority communities and most are first-generation college students. What they’re learning at Concordia and through Acton University is liberating in a profound way.
Ferguson became a classical liberal by reading books like The Gulag Archipelago, by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder, by political scientist R.J. Rummel. “Understanding the horrors of the totalitarian state sends one scrambling to understand how free societies can really work well,” Ferguson says. “And of course, my faith helped me see clearly one of the major elements of a free society: thick civil society institutions like the church.” For Ferguson, classical liberalism is the natural outgrowth of her faith: “Although we have separate nations, we do see every person as operating under the same moral law.”
Ferguson is devoted to popularizing classical liberal ideas for the public. “I started out studying property rights,” she says, “and have naturally moved into how the failure to protect such rights affects groups that the state excludes. But I’m also interested in the ways that we all—and perhaps the marginalized among us most of all—have leveraged our civil society institutions to make life worth living, even in the face of terrible circumstances.”
As a faculty member, Ferguson is now part of a growing network of liberty-oriented faculty across the nation. “For years, Acton provided spaces for new faculty that I would fill with my new contacts,” she says. “It is such a powerful way to get ideological fellow travelers plugged into all of the wonderful opportunities that Acton provides for on-campus content, engagement with church leaders, and student internship opportunities.”
Many of Ferguson’s Concordia students are grateful for her introducing them to Acton where they have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the ideas of a free and virtuous society. They’re also being connected to a diverse and thriving community that spans the world. Ferguson has met friends at Acton who she brings to her campus, including a Chinese dissident who was jailed for his involvement in Tiananmen Square and Magatte Wade, an entrepreneur from Senegal, whom she calls “a life-changing speaker for the nonprofit administration students.”
Meeting people—and bringing them together through Acton—especially energizes Ferguson. It’s not just about the ideas of freedom in theory, but about how human beings live out those ideas in reality. From her perspective, the most powerful thing about Acton University probably isn’t any one lecture or moment; rather, it’s “this sense of connection with those striving to be free all over the world.”
