Cliché as it may be to say so, I find it next to impossible to conjure words to convey what has been lost with Michael Burawoy’s untimely death. The weight of his absence is enormous; its expanse vast and far-reaching; its reverberations still in motion, their endpoints still unknown. When forced to harness feelings into words, I return again and again to one facet of Michael’s being that connects so many of us – whether we know it or not – and that is somehow a bit easier for me to write about: his teaching. 

Although I was never Michael’s student, formally speaking, teaching was a central pillar of our relationship as colleagues and as friends. Teaching somehow shaped almost every conversation we ever had. On our regular walks in the Berkeley hills above Campus, we talked endlessly about teaching. About the practice of it; the theory of it; the politics of it; the sweat and tears and stress and administrative headaches of it; and most of all, in the day-to-day and over the long-term, about the deeply gratifying joy of it.

Michael loved teaching with all of his heart. And he taught with all of his might. He often said teaching was a privilege. He engaged in teaching as an existential mission. Teaching was integral to who Michael was as a scholar, a writer, a speaker, an activist, a colleague, and a human being. I think teaching is what made Michael the sociologist he was. I also think Michael’s distinctive sociological lens deeply shaped the kind of teacher he was.

Michael never let us forget that teaching is at once a social relation between human beings, and a labor relation, between worker and employer, especially in the context of the neoliberal university. Michael worked and played with this tension in different ways at different moments. Whenever there was a labor action, he refused the question: “Do I cancel class or do I cross the picket line?” Michael never cancelled class.  His students had worked too hard to earn their spots at UC Berkeley, and he did not see how cancelling their classes was anything but abdication of his responsibility to them. But nor would he cross the picket line. Instead, he taught his classes on the picket line. 

Michael completely rejected the “empty vessel” or “banking” theory of education, recognizing, with Paulo Freire, that students arrive at school, and even more so at university, already filled with knowledge and theories that have served them to survive in the worlds they come from.  Michael valued and was endlessly curious about those many worlds. Again and again, each year anew, he sought to learn about them through getting to know his students.

Michael’s teaching made students feel seen and valued as individuals. His teaching made students feel this way because he did see and value them as individuals. Michael was genuinely interested in who his students were, where they came from, what experiences had forged them, what conjunctures and decisions had brought them to a seat in his classroom at UC Berkeley, and what they would end up doing afterwards with whatever they learned (or unlearned) there. He was genuinely interested in the research his students did and in how it might disrupt the status quo. His default assumption was that each student he encountered – indeed, each human he encountered – was a uniquely interesting person with something uniquely important to contribute to building a better world – at least potentially, if provided the minimum necessary intellectual support and material conditions to do so.

Michael also saw students as the most innovative and powerful creators of community, of solidarity, and he worked hard and consistently to create and sustain conditions that facilitated their collective efforts. His undergraduate and PhD students will tell you all sorts of ways that he did this. He did this for his colleagues and for staff members in the department too, making each of us feel seen and special, and fostering our community through a sense of shared purpose in the radical pedagogical mission of Berkeley as a flagship public university in the state of California. 

For many, many years, Michael gave the closing speech at our department’s graduation ceremony. Sociology at Berkeley graduates a few hundred students per year, and sometimes as many as 50% of these students are first in their families to graduate from university. Michael would pause at one point in his remarks and ask all the students who were the first from their families to graduate from university to stand up. Then he would ask them to turn around and face their families and friends in the packed auditorium. From my perspective as a faculty member, sitting in a row of other faculty up on the stage in our ridiculous robes, I got to see the faces of all the parents and family members and friends beaming with pride as they looked into the faces of their new graduates. These were the moments I felt most proud to be a teacher, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, a part of the collective political project to defend and sustain the public university as a space and set of relations where it is still possible to nurture the conditions for the cultivation of good sense, to help sow seeds for a more socially just world.  

Michael was a fierce defender of the public university and its potential to create conditions for more radical social change. At the same time, he was a realist about its current guise and form, its bureaucratic inertia and institutional conservativism. I learned so much from his theatrically brilliant leadership of the Berkeley Faculty Association. His leadership persistently centered the question of what the university and its faculty owes its students – not as “consumers”, but as human beings who deserve the opportunity to pursue their own curiosities, to ask big questions and think big thoughts, the chance to learn, and to put what they learn into action.

When I became Department Chair, Michael was a trusted confidant as I learned to navigate the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the UC system, and to do so with that same question always in mind. Michael would be bluntly honest when my ideas about changing the system from within were laughable (and yes, he laughed out loud, and loudly). In my experience, it is a rare and precious thing to find a human in the world who you can trust completely, who will tell you what they really think about your ideas with brutal honesty, with beautiful clarity, and with just the right dose of compassion. There are even fewer who you can trust in this way and who will continue to support you unequivocally as a friend and colleague when you ignore their skepticism, treat their laughter as a gauntlet, and proceed to act against their sage advice.

Michael’s affective approach to teaching spilled over to his approach to living (or perhaps it was the reverse, or perhaps there is no real distinction): he was open, curious, eager to learn from others. And he was always so damn game. He seemed game for anything really.  From: “Hey Michael, want to help me shell a basket of beans from the farm?” “OK!!!!!! What time??” To: “Hi Michael, I think we should start a new tradition – an annual hike for the first-year cohort in Pt Reyes. What do you think?” “OKEE-DOKEE!! Let’s give it a try!” 

During my years as Department Chair, Michael and I started an annual ritual of taking the first-year cohort of graduate students for a little hike before the semester began. We initially conceived it as a chance for the new students to get to know the “Department Leadership.” More importantly, it was a chance for the newest members of our sociology community to start to get to know each other “before the Fall semester consumed them”, as Michael put it. We’d set out early in the morning from Campus – Michael smiling and ready to go in his black Adidas track suit, already warmed up by his bike ride from Oakland. We’d caravan north across the Richmond bridge through Fairfax and over the hills to Pt Reyes. After a stop for provisions, we’d embark the unsuspecting students on a 15km out-and-back trek to the glorious edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a long hike, admittedly. All the more time for Michael to engage each and every student in conversation. We learned. Sometimes we modified the route in the following years. We also broadened the invitation to include other colleagues, students from older cohorts, visiting postdocs, and dear old friends. Those hikes with Michael Burawoy and all the extraordinary human beings they brought together are among my most precious memories as part of the UC Berkeley sociology community. When I look back — through tears — at these photos today, I’m struck by all the faces who were strangers to me on the morning each hike began, and who I now know well as members of our shared sociology community, as students, colleagues, and as friends.

My colleague and friend Dylan Riley has observed that grief feels heavy because grief is not only sorrow for what is lost. Grief weighs because it is the ongoing presence of responsibility, for what remains. UC Berkeley Sociology is left with an enormous responsibility to carry forward Michael Burawoy’s work, on so many fronts, as best we can. As I think about how to even begin to do this, I return again and again to Michael’s teaching as a pillar of his life’s work and his way of being in the world. 

Michael practiced teaching as a quintessentially human relationship, between un-alienated human beings. He practiced teaching as a refusal of the commodification of learning. He practiced teaching as resistance against neoliberal and managerial pressures within the university that would diminish and deaden and devalue our genuine connections with each other and with the world. And he practiced teaching as radical politics, a means to learn together and to unflinchingly reveal critical truths – about class exploitation under “capitalism on earth”, about colonial subjugation, about masculine domination, about the violence of white racism, and about genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – however uncomfortable to the powers that be.

As the university, as a place for genuine teaching and learning, comes under increasing pressure and outright frontal attacks, I sometimes find myself talking to Michael in my head: “But Michael, what is to be done?” And he replies: “But Mara, what choice do we have?” We must continue to train ourselves against the assaults.  We have no other choice. We must put on our own personal equivalents of Michael’s black Adidas tracksuit and train, gearing up for the struggle over the long haul. 

Among the many things I learned from Michael: training in and for these times includes taking regular walks with friends. Friends we already know and trust and love. And friends we are open to getting to know – open in the way Michael always was – to new humans we might learn from, and to new and more just communities we might still form and become, as teachers and as students, all of us, always, both.