From Max Weber to Zohran Mamdani

In his classic lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” which he delivered in Munich in November 1917, the sociologist Max Weber had this to say about the university scene in the United States: The American sees a teacher at the front of the room and thinks: This man is selling me his knowledge and methods for my father’s money, just like the woman in the grocery store sells my mother her vegetables. Fast forward a century, and it’s no longer students who think of professors as corner grocers; it’s the professors themselves. Here’s our old friend Columbia professor Brent Stockwell—last heard expressing terror in the NYT over the prospect of being reduced to the status of a community college instructor “teaching […]