Victor Davis Hanson - Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
He was a full-time farmer before joining CSU Fresno, in 1984 to initiate a classics program. In 1991, he was awarded an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given yearly to the country's top undergraduate teachers of Greek and Latin.
Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991-92), a recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for opinion journalism (2002), and an Alexander Onassis Fellow (2001) and was named alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2002).
He was also the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland (2002-3). He received the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lectureship in 2004, and the 2006 Nimitz Lectureship in Military History at UC Berkeley in 2006.
John Raisian - John Raisian is director of the Hoover Institution, assuming his position in 1989. He also holds an appointment as a senior fellow and is an economist who has specialized in national and international labor market and human resource issues. He joined the Hoover Institution in 1986 as a fellow, while serving as associate director during 1986-88, and deputy director during 1988-89.
He received his B.A. in economics and mathematics from Ohio University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1978.
Raisian was a consultant to the Rand Corporation from 1974 to 1975 after which he went to the University of Washington as a visiting assistant professor of economics in 1975-76.
From 1976 to 1980, he was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Houston where he received a distinguished teaching award from the College of Social Sciences.
In 1980, he entered public service as a senior economist in the Office of Research and Evaluation, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1981, he joined the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, in two capacities - Special Assistant for Economic Policy, a role he held until 1983, and Director of Research and Technical Support, which he left in 1984.
As a result of his work for the U.S. Department of Labor, he received the Department's Distinguished Service Award. In 1983, he took a leave of absence from the Labor Department to serve as executive director of the President's Task Force on Food Assistance.
After leaving the Department of Labor, Raisian became president of Unicon Research Corporation, an economic consulting firm in Los Angeles, where he worked until joining the Hoover Institution in 1986.
There is a cliched smugness to Mr. Hanson's complaints that show more evidence of his ignorance of the modern academic world than familiarity. He props up a number of feeble targets that cater to interests in popular culture and then demolishes them with cynicism rather than engage them with debate. I have no idea whether or not any of the classes he targets are worthy of a university environment, but I would not dismiss them based solely on the title proffered in the course catalogue. As a Classics student Mr. Hanson may believe that all wisdom resides in the canon (and some of it certainly does), but in fact the world and its inhabitants have changed, as have their interests and means of discourse. Mr. Hanson is preaching to exactly the kind of audience he decried at the beginning of his talk, a group of deductive reactors, who come with a set of prejudices and pre-conceptions that Mr. Hanson will flatter and compliment. He comes off as shallow and ideological in his thought, and lazy in his thinking and presentation skills. This was a profound disappointment on a topic for which I care deeply.
