Victor Davis Hanson, through hard work and luck, has parlayed his Stanford Classics PhD into a successful career as classicist, military historian, columnist, and conservative pundit. I just finished A War Like no Other http://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian... which I recommend, but I don't think it's odd for him to write this. Even with hard work most folks with liberal arts degrees won't see much success in liberal arts endeavors, but more specifically I think he was referring to farming, which is a side hobby for him and liberal arts degrees in his family did not contribute to success with the family homestead.