Remarks revised from April 2025 symposium, “A World in Crisis: On the Legacy of Michael Burawoy,” UC Merced

Other memorials have recounted Michael’s scholarly contributions, so I want to write specifically about Michael as a doctoral adviser. One can’t write about Michael without starting with his unbelievable generosity. He read something like fifteen drafts of my master’s paper, but I lost count after the tenth, so I’m not sure. In his graduate theory seminar, we found that his comments on our weekly memos were usually longer than our memos themselves. One year he sent me paper comments on Christmas morning. A few months ago, I sent him a new dissertation chapter at 1pm on a Friday, and when I woke up Saturday morning, he’d sent me multiple pages of single-spaced comments in the middle of the night. In my second year of graduate school, when I got demoralizing feedback from another professor, he cleared his schedule so we could discuss the feedback the very next day. And so on.

I knew Michael was famous, but it never felt that way when I was with him. He always acted like my project was the most important thing in the world and nothing could draw him away. Somehow, he was like that with all his students, and with everyone else he met. This generosity reflected one of Michael’s most important principles. Michael understood that everyone matters just as much as everyone else, so the person in front of you is always the most important person in the world. 

Michael knew what his students needed better than we knew it ourselves. One of his other students, Zach Levenson, writes that it was like Michael had different personalities for each student and he finds it strange to hear about Michael’s sense of humor when he experienced Michael as intense, serious, and demanding, exactly what Zach needed (Levenson 2025). And in turn, I find Zach’s account of Michael’s intensity surprising, since with me Michael was always very gentle and encouraging. The only time he ever raised his voice was when I broke down from anxiety before my qualifying exams, when Michael yelled that I’d been ready for the exams since my first day of graduate school. (Untrue, but comforting!) He knew I loved to knit, and whenever I sent him an especially anxious middle-of-the-night email, he’d write back telling me to concentrate on knitting.   

Michael used to say that he didn’t care about our personal lives, he saw us as vehicles for our dissertations. He wrote about this in his essay “Combat in the Dissertation Zone”:

I remember sharing thoughts on supervision with one of my senior colleagues. We were taken aback by each other’s approach – she at my instrumentalism and I at her parentalism. She saw herself in loco parentis, caring for her students’ many needs, knowing details about their lives and they about hers. I, on the other hand, care only about the dissertation and the rest will have to take care of itself, unless, of course, it interferes with academic progress. You are but the instrument for realizing your dissertation rather than the dissertation as a means for realizing yourself (Burawoy 2005b).

That was Michael’s narrative of his mentorship style, but the reality was more complicated. I’ve heard his other students dismiss his “instrument for your dissertation” line as a complete lie, since he was sensitive to what was going on in our lives and available to discuss it. But it’s true that he was intensely focused on work. Let me share the last email Michael sent me:

Subject line: Dissertation. 

Full text: Emily, I know you are preoccupied with your job decision, but what are your thoughts on completing your dissertation? Best, Michael.

It’s a comically blunt email and when I reread it, I’m overwhelmed with how much I love him. Michael cared deeply about us as people, but as part of that care, he helped us maintain focus on our scholarly work as a source of joy and meaning. He knew I was stressed about the job market, and he knew I would handle it best if I focused on my project. Furthermore, he was aware of graduate school as a labor process and of the power relations between supervisor and supervised. Pressure to “bring your whole self to work,” in academia as in the corporate world, can become pressure to subsume your whole self to work. By focusing on our dissertations, Michael freed us from the professionalization of our entire lives and gave us back our evenings and weekends. We didn’t have to account to him in our personal lives, everyday habits, or political work. Most sociologists are motivated by personal experiences to some degree, but he didn’t demand a clean narrative of what those experiences were.

Michael’s laser focus on my dissertation kept me true to my sociological instincts. I remember him chastising me for a fellowship application where I’d warped my project to fit what I thought reviewers would want to hear. After I discarded the glossy, professionalized draft in favor of a straightforward description of my project, he told me to tack the side-by-side comparison between the two statements above my desk as a reminder of the kind of sociologist I wanted to be. When I was struggling with a brutal R&R, he counseled me again and again to write the paper that I believed to be most honest, no matter whether the reviewers would be satisfied. I followed his advice and the paper got rejected on the third round, at which point I nearly dropped out of grad school, but it came out in the end and I’m grateful to have written an authentic account of my case. If academic careers are determined by chance, then you may as well keep your integrity. Michael believed that if you produced the best and truest version of your project, it would eventually find an audience, whereas watering down your work wouldn’t fool anyone anyway. (Although he did make me take the word “proletariat” out of my job talk.)

In 1975, Edward Shils tried to sabotage Michael’s job applications with an extremely critical letter of recommendation. Michael got ahold of the letter, somehow, and hung it on his office wall as counterintuitive inspiration. As Shils wrote:

It is my impression that Mr. Burawoy is hampered intellectually by excessive and unrealistic preoccupation with what he regards as conflicts between himself and the prevailing trends of sociological analysis in the United States. He seems to think that he must struggle to prevent himself from being overpowered or seduced by ‘mainstream sociology.’ At the same time, I have not ever detected any originality on Mr. Burawoy’s part…It might be that there is no spark of originality in him, or it might be that he is holding it in reserve. Since, however, I have known him for a long time and he has never hesitated to express his opinions to me on a wide variety of political and other subjects, I would incline toward the former hypothesis…Somehow, either the security of sectarianism or a juvenile antinomianism seems to have got the better of him. I first noticed the latter in Cambridge. At that time he was an undergraduate and I thought it would pass. Thus far it has not (Burawoy 2005a).

It was so Michael to save this ridiculous letter, which could have ended his career, and put it up on his wall. Whatever sets you apart, whatever others criticize about you, that’s the very thing that gives you your edge and that you must not lose. Shils said he thought Michael’s antinomian Marxism would pass, but as of 1975, it had not. And of course it never did. 

He was the most principled person I’ve met in my life. As an untenured assistant professor, he supported Berkeley grad students in filing one of the first sexual harassment lawsuits in the country against one of his senior colleagues. He was subsequently denied tenure for his anti-capitalist politics. He saw the fight against modes of settler colonialism in Zambia, in South Africa, and most recently in Palestine as a guiding struggle of his life. He once got into a physical fight with a senior anthropologist involved in the colonization of Africa. He redistributed much of his own salary back to his graduate students, probably over a million dollars throughout the course of his career. And he never, ever crossed a picket line, instead bringing his classes to the picket line every time UC workers went on strike.

Michael spent his career making sense of global atrocities, most recently the genocide in Gaza (Burawoy 2025), yet he maintained a remarkable optimism. He wrote once that he learned this optimism from the American civil rights movement as he encountered it as a teenager in the 1960s (Burawoy 2005a). Day-to-day he was cheerful, funny, and energetic, and he believed that the world could be radically transformed. He believed that our sociological work should be grounded in this optimism, and that sociology might contribute directly to anti-capitalist struggle through engagement with publics from labor organizers to people living under apartheid to Michael’s own students. In his last few years, he supported the Berkeley Journal of Sociology as one such site of public engagement. Losing Michael at the beginning of the second Trump administration feels particularly cruel, as we so badly need his optimism right now to guide resistance to the dismantling of the state and the intensification of imperial violence. As Michael’s students and colleagues, we can offer no better tribute than channeling his optimism and working towards the world that he believed to be possible. 

References

Burawoy, Michael. 2005a. “Antinomian Marxist.” In The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the 60s, edited by Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, pp. 48-71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Burawoy, Michael. 2005b. “Combat in the Dissertation Zone.” The American Sociologist 36:43-56.

Burawoy, Michael. 2025. “Why and How Should Sociologists Speak Out on Palestine?” The Sociological Review 73(2):249-260.

Levenson, Zachary. 2025. “The Sociologist and the Critic: Remembering Michael Burawoy.” Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-sociologist-and-the-critic-remembering-michael-burawoy?srsltid=AfmBOoo0iJfaNKf0lzBJ92_pmC4w8cCKjtYZ4wXJs7QRNTar7yFLWimt.