Max Weber, Abuse, and Our Scholarly Role

Abstract

Max Weber, Abuse, and Our Scholarly Role Ray Buckner I don't think it's a coincidence that I find her in my dreams each night. That I wake up tired, exhausted even, because I cannot escape her. She who abused me for years and who, although no longer in my life, still marks my life by her presence. I attended a small liberal arts college in a large US city. When I started my studies in 2011, my institution was in significant upheaval. My professor was the main faculty member fighting against sexual violence on campus. She stood firmly with survivors and actively and unrelentingly challenged the administration. She did this work with profound cost. The administration came after her. They retaliated against her. Few colleagues were willing to stand alongside her. My ex-girlfriend was willing to stand alongside her. In my first year of college, my body and mind were in precarious positions. On the one hand, my heart was opening to theories that helped me account for violence that I had experienced in my own life and to forms of violence that I had known little about. Reading works by James Baldwin, Judith Butler, and Audre Lorde, I was beginning to make sense of the ways individuals and groups are harmed through bodily dispossession and state violence. I yearned to fight for justice and to match my theoretical passion with lived practice. Though I found a home through theory, I felt isolated in my everyday life. As a transgender student, [End Page 93] I struggled to find a home in my body and to relate to other students. In that moment my (now) ex-girlfriend and my (now) former professor entered my life. A student two years my senior, my ex had a life intimately intertwined with my professor's. My professor's actions exemplify the harm that can be done when professorial boundaries are weak, when young minds are open, and when students are in search of themselves—their values, their bodies, their future. What is the role of the scholar in shaping a student? What is the vocation of the scholar? During the fall of 2021, I read Max Weber's lecture, "The Scholar's Work," as part of a doctoral course titled "The Study of Religion as Vocation," offered by my advisor Robert Orsi. Engaging Weber allowed me to contemplate not only the role of the scholar in general, but the specific actions and failures of my former professor. Weber delivered "The Scholar's Work" in 1917 to a group of radical and dedicated university students from the Free Student Alliance in Munich. During the period that Weber delivered these remarks, he was keenly aware of the dangers that could arise when scholars were expected to advance particular professional and political personas. In a time of war, Weber knew that scholars were asked to perform not only as charismatic professors, but as moralists. Weber's lectures on "The Scholar's Work" make clear that, especially in times of social upheaval with the world order, scholars must be acutely aware of their capacity to influence, in myriad directions, the lives of students. Weber emphasizes the lecture hall, where he perceives a fundamentally unequal relationship between teacher and student. There, the student cannot speak: "In the lecture hall," he claims, "you speak and the students sitting before you must listen in silence, and I feel it is irresponsible to exploit this state of affairs."1 The word "exploit" is essential to grappling with the seriousness of this power differential. As I read Weber, when a student is spoken to and cannot speak back, only able to speak with the lecturer, the student becomes inherently vulnerable. This may not feel vulnerable, but exploitation and the capacity of the instructor to transform and impose their positions onto the student is great. Such vulnerability moves in two directions. The teacher is vulnerable to their longing for a loyal student, who offers support within an antagonistic institution. The student is vulnerable to the need and desire for professional networks, a sense of safety and friendship within a new and often challenging college experience, and a vocational path that the...