Margaret Eby, Elizabeth Torres Carpio, Justin Germain, Thomas Gepts, and Natalie Pasquinelli spent several years working with Michael Burawoy on what they called the Extractive University Project, a collective ethnographic investigation of public higher education from the standpoint of graduate student workers. They share these reflections on their early days of the project with Michael as the project moved from a graduate pedagogy course to an ethnography practicum and finally to an ongoing conversation among friends. 

Margaret:

When we gathered to talk about times when we felt Michael’s passion and attention most keenly, one exchange rose to the surface. About six months into our work together, we dropped the ball. After giving Michael a truly awful set of drafts  – which three years later would become a special issue of Work and Occupations – he sent us an email sharing his disappointment and frustration and encouraging us to seriously consider whether we wanted to continue with this project. We each remember this turning point in different ways, but we all agreed that this was a moment both in which the entire enterprise might have shut down, and one in which the stakes became clear. 

Eli: 

Our group emerged from a required course for first-time teaching assistants, co-instructed by Margaret and Michael, during the first remote semester of COVID-19. Invigorated by the pedagogy of sociology, a group of us decided to continue meeting to explore the sociology of pedagogy with a set of ethnographic studies. 

During that Spring, I was engaged in one of the toughest wars I’ve had to fight. In my quest to make a family, back-to-back miscarriages were my battlefield. With each fight and each loss, Michael was there with encouraging and kind words. When I was late turning in something, he was understanding and accommodating. His feedback was gracious and supportive, while also determined to get the best work out of my wartime psyche. While it was a particularly tough time for me, my colleagues were going through it too. We were teaching for the first time in the panic and uncertainty of the pandemic. When our first drafts were due, they were nowhere near complete. Michael then changed his approach to us in a single, memorable email.

The email came on June 1, 2021, about five days after we met at Michael’s apartment to celebrate the end of the semester, physically turn in our papers, and eat Thai food in his dimly lit living room. The opening lines read: “Well, I’ve read your papers. There is no shortage of ideas but there is scarcity of follow through. I’m disappointed. I’ve never received such a set of incomplete papers—papers without a beginning, a middle and an end!” Then he set out two alternatives: to stop where we were or to reaffirm our commitment to the project, and to each other. Reading these opening lines was a punch to the stomach. But boy, did it work! We met as a group within hours of receiving that email, and we drafted a response that reassured him that we were in it. We had working sessions almost every day for the next two weeks and submitted our completed drafts. Michael knew exactly what we needed, when we needed it, and how we needed it. The tough love reaffirmed our commitment to the project. For the next five years, we soared as a group, meeting every week, always on Zoom since we lived all across the country and even, as Michael loved to share, on the day after Thanksgiving.

Natalie:

You would think, given Michael’s rebuke, that the draft comments would be harsh. Instead, mine opened with, “MAGNIFICENT! Fabulous diagram to open your paper!! This is already a racy account.” His disappointment was tempered with encouragement, awe, the sense that you can’t give up–this idea is too brilliant!

As I’ve re-read this exchange—the disappointed email and the exuberant comments—I felt moved by his absolute devotion to us and to pedagogy. He had spent the previous year meeting with us for three hours every week, reading every draft, and commenting on every set of fieldnotes. He had just given each of us thousands of dollars of summer funding so that we could shape the paper drafts into book chapters. And what did we do? We didn’t even really write the drafts, and we showed up at his apartment to eat Thai food anyway. He should have been angry; he probably was. But he set all this aside in his comments so that I wouldn’t lose faith in myself. They were characteristically Michael—serious but cheerful, pointed but hilarious (“This is a paper, not a murder mystery! The argument should come at the beginning!”)

At the time, I thought maybe my work was so magnificent that, even if he was furious, he simply couldn’t help but respond this way. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I’m sure others recognize the feeling. This was Michael’s gift to us—he made us believe we were brilliant. And he must have really thought we were, at least some of the time anyway. How else could he have continued to deal with us for four more years?

Margaret:

Michael and I exchanged hundreds of emails since we started teaching the graduate pedagogy course. Searching for the word “incomplete” turned up not just the email responding to our drafts, but also an exchange that I had completely forgotten about—Michael had emailed me privately to talk through his feelings of disappointment and devise a plan before he sent his message to the group. Towards the end of a thread with the subject line “Are you OK?” (it was the week of my qualifying exams and I’d been uncharacteristically out of touch), Michael tells me that he’s read through the papers, none of which he says are complete, some barely making it through an introduction or referencing field notes. “I’m feeling what a number of the GSIs were feeling at the end of the semester about their own students – a sort of betrayal on the one side and a recognition that it’s been just too much for everyone.” In the messages that follow, we talk through the options—Michael agrees it would be a shame to leave the project at this stage—he says he’ll send a message to everyone that day to discern their commitments. I remember realizing through those messages that he understood my own fragility around teaching so clearly because he felt it himself. Michael never stopped recognizing himself in the teacher’s struggle. He was deeply committed to the emotional and intellectual vulnerability that comes with sharing something you care about so much. 

Justin:

To know Michael was to know his pedagogy. In no way did he view education as happening solely within the walls of a lecture hall, as much as he was known for invigorating even the driest lectures on social theory by racing down the aisles. Michael’s pedagogy extended to the picket line, connecting the solidarity, rage, and hope of his students to a long history of labor struggle. It extended to Zoom, where not even a pandemic could stop his push to study the university we take for granted, to reflect on the successes and failures of teaching, and to check in on each other as life’s hurdles made intellectual progress feel so daunting. It even extended to something as small as an email replete with tough love. Michael was not one to sugarcoat the difficulties of academic work, nor to cast it aside as something not worth doing—much of this rang true in these late-night emails, all still ending with some message of hope. Hope for the project we all cared about, hope for the university amidst its crumbling support for education as a social good, and hope for his students—we all felt his care as he ushered us through life’s lowest points, showing that we and our work mattered. Michael saw us, understood us. To engage on this project with Michael as our guide was to live his pedagogy, one inseparable from thoughtfulness, empowerment, and hope. 

Thomas:

“From the perspective of Oakland, California, it looks like the planet will never be the same again.” So wrote Michael in his 2021 “critical memoir,” Public Sociology, referring to that time’s conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic, global protests for racial justice, and sharpening left and right politics. On the rainy day when I learned of Michael’s tragic passing, it was immediately, painfully obvious that the planet would indeed never be the same. Mixed with my shock and grief was a fear of facing today’s dark sociopolitical moment without Michael. It felt gratuitously unjust to not only lose Michael as we did, but to lose him in a time when those of us inspired by his moral and social commitments needed his loving spirit and intellectual light more than ever.

Truthfully, this fear remains. However, with the privilege of being Michael’s student for over five years, I learned to vest faith and hope not with any single individual, but in the members of a community committing themselves to one another toward collective discovery and growth. His mentorship and teaching modeled this wisdom. Responding to those most incomplete papers, his challenge to us was to either quit while we were ahead or to reaffirm “a strong collective commitment and mutual aid.” Looking back on how the project flourished into a vitalizing and supportive exchange, probably the greatest educational experience of my life, proves to me the truth in Michael’s approach.  From my perspective in Berkeley, California, the planet will never be the same without Michael, but the profound care he showed those around him provides us a rich example of how to carry forward his legacy in our professional and, inseparably, our public lives. 

All:

Michael often signed off emails with “OAU,” his acronym for “Onwards and Upwards,” including in his response to us after we reaffirmed our commitment to our collective project (“renewed our vows,” as he put it). With these reflections, we renew our vows once more, recommitting to the collective, engaged, and moral sociology that Michael taught us. OAU.