I didn’t know Michael well the first time I went to his office hours. I was one of the teaching assistants for his social theory class, and I had been dazzled by his brilliance and charisma in lecture. But when I arrived, he was in a sour mood, something I hadn’t yet experienced (although I would certainly become familiar once I was his advisee!). Up until that point, I had only seen Michael-as-legend, the Pied Piper of sociology. He could get those undergrads to do anything! He had them enthusiastically reciting Marx, writing songs about Gramsci, excitedly forming study groups outside of class. This was 2010, and the students expected PowerPoint notes they could download in lieu of attending lecture. But Michael, who refused to own a cell phone, kept it analog. He filled all four of the giant blackboards in Le Conte Hall with his notes and diagrams. “I’m going to draw you a beautiful picture!” he would say in a sing-song voice, the pictures decidedly not beautiful but effective. (I use my own renditions for teaching fifteen years later!) He was serious and systematic, of course: his lectures were dense, and he was often visibly sweating by the end, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. But what I remember most is the laughing: Michael laughed at himself, often, and he loved to gently tease the students and us GSIs. Crucially, we were all in on the joke.

From any other professor, this display of over-the-top enthusiasm would come off as corny, like the rehearsed zeal of a motivational speaker who was high on their own supply of aphorisms. It would therefore be ineffective: undergrads may not have fully developed frontal lobes, but they are expert bullshit detectors. But not Michael. Was it his accent? His avuncular charm? His good-natured teasing? Whatever it was, his exuberance worked them into a frenzy. The students’ hands shot up, eagerly competing for Michael’s spotlight to shine on them. I remember wondering idly if we would be reading Weber on charismatic authority. I had never seen anything like it. 

But on this day, in office hours, his characteristic good cheer was notably absent. He was morose, drained. I was taken aback, and because I didn’t know him that well, I ventured a hesitant “everything okay?” He sighed and told me that he wasn’t happy with his lecture that day. He then detailed everything that had gone wrong: the dynamic was off, he couldn’t get the students engaged, he had forgotten to mention something crucial, his explanations were convoluted. “A disaster!” he said, his face slack with disappointment. I sat there quietly and in shock, not least because I was getting a glimpse of the emotional interiority of a notoriously private person, but also because I had actually been in lecture that day and hadn’t noticed any of the things he said. 

“Even after almost 35 years, a bad teaching day still gets to me,” he said.  

Here was the best lecturer I had ever seen, an incomparably dedicated, generous, organized, inspiring teacher who had been at it for longer than I had been alive! And he was this bummed out from a lecture that was leaps ahead of your run-of-the-mill theory class? How could that be? Perhaps it was such a surprise because it brought Michael down to earth: turns out, contrary to popular belief, he was human after all. But beyond finding out that Michael was a mere mortal like the rest of us, the conversation made such an impression because it went against the grain of the dominant message that I had received in graduate school until then: avoid teaching at all costs. Teaching was often framed as an obligation that academics had to do from time to time, but this was always to be second to what was most important: our research. As hyper-professionalization was increasingly overtaking the discipline—I distinctly remember in our first year proseminar in 2007 being told by a faculty member that “to be successful, you cannot take a single day off, not even Christmas”—the status of teaching sunk even lower. I acutely felt the hierarchy among the graduate students, those with cushy multi-year fellowships at the top, and those who had to teach at the very bottom. As someone at the bottom, seeing Michael take teaching so seriously was a revelation. I loved teaching, as unfashionable as that was, and it was validating to see how it could be valued by someone who was also a serious scholar.

That memory has resurfaced frequently for me over the years, especially after my own unsuccessful classes, which similarly ruin my day, and I often think about what made Michael such an extraordinary teacher. He wrote a few articles about his teaching, which explain the logic and brilliance of his teaching much more successfully than I can here. But long before I read those pieces, I experienced firsthand the magic of his approach. Specifically, the importance of creating community for learning. Make no mistake, Michael was no Durkheimian—but he understood the power of collective effervescence. To be in his class, to teach for him, to be his advisee was not just to go through the motions, a means to an end—the grade or the degree. It was, as I quickly learned, to be inducted into something bigger than oneself. To buy in was not just about learning theory or writing the best dissertation you possibly could, although those things would also happen. It was the thrill and strength of being part of the collective, learning together, struggling through difficult texts, of being in on the joke, and then Bob’s your uncle! You’re a sociologist.

Michael, ever the ethnographer, leveraged his skills of observation in his teaching and advising. This was important when figuring out how to be an advisor to so many students. At his retirement party in 2023, it was a shock and delight to see the ways he was the same with all of advisees—how exacting and hard on us he could be!—and yet how each of us had an idiosyncratic mentoring relationship with him that was specific to us as individuals. That he achieved by paying such close attention, noticing the quirks of our personalities, our strengths and weaknesses. I often felt he could see the cultural capital chip on my shoulder, that I was desperate to leave behind my rural midwestern roots. Every week he generously treated the teaching assistants to dinner, and he always asked me to pick the wine. I knew nothing about wine but liked the idea that someone might think I did. 

Michael eventually became my dissertation advisor, and after that my project was central to our discussions. But my connection with Michael, really, was about teaching. It is fitting, when I look back at our relationship now, to see that I taught for him first and was his advisee second. Teaching for him changed my relationship to the discipline. The “rituals of solidarity” that he put in place for the graduate students who taught for him—the weekly meetings, dinners, arguing over theory, gossiping, endless inside jokes—meant everything to me. After feeling alienated and distanced in grad school, I finally saw my own worth and contribution that was forged through experience of teaching together. At last, I was tethered. Maybe I did belong at Berkeley after all. 

These days, my commute to work is long—two hours each way. When I started teaching the two-semester theory sequence at my college, I was nervous. I decided I needed to put my long drive to good use, so I began listening to Michael’s theory lectures from 2008-09. It was less a lesson on Marx and more a pep talk, as if between the lines he was urging me: you can do it! Listening to them again was soothing and entertaining—I still laugh at the jokes even though I’ve now heard them three or four times each. Sometimes I even groan out loud and say, “Michael!” at the particularly cheesy ones. It has become my pre-teaching ritual, and I know the lectures by heart.

After he was killed, I wasn’t sure I could handle listening to them anymore. Would I end up a teary mess by the time I got to work? But I found they had the opposite effect: piped in through the speakers of my car stereo, suddenly Michael was alive again, vital and laughing, shouting about how Marx was totally wrong… but he was very nearly right! What a comfort to feel that the Pied Piper was still at it. I’ll always follow. Thanks for the lessons, Michael.