Background
Aaron Director was born on 21st September, 1901, in Staryi Chortoryisk, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire (now - Ukraine).
University professor of law and economics
Aaron Director was born on 21st September, 1901, in Staryi Chortoryisk, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire (now - Ukraine).
In Portland, Director attended Lincoln High School where he served as the yearbook editors He then moved east to attend Yale University in Connecticut, where his friend, artist Mark Rothko also attended. He graduated in 1924 after three years of study.
In 1926, he returned to Portland where he was hired to run and teach at the Portland Labor College. As a radical, his invitations to Communists and Wobblies created friction with the American Federation of Labor-Congress craft unions which sponsored the College. During World World War II, he held positions in the War Department and the Department of Commerce.
Political theorist and economist Friedrich Hayek, who was in another department at Chicago and was not in the "Chicago School,".
Was close to Director. They met in England and Director convinced the University of Chicago Press to publish Hayek's Road to Serfdom.
Hayek actively promoted Director in helping to fund and establish the Law and Society program in the Law School. Hayek convinced the Volker Fund, a foundation in Kansas City, to provide the funding.
In 1962, he helped to found the Committee on a Free Society.
In 1946, Director's appointment to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School began a half-century of intellectual productivity, although his reluctance about publishing left few writings behind. Director taught the antitrust courses at the law school with Edward Levi, who eventually would serve as the Dean of Chicago’s Law School, President of the University of Chicago, and as United States. Attorney General in the Ford administration. After retiring from the University of Chicago Law School in 1965, Director relocated to California and took a position at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
After two years, he left for Chicago, where his radicalism was exchanged for a lifelong conservative ideology.