Michael Burawoy was larger than life. He was a whirlwind of energy dedicated to reshaping sociology. He articulated the many faces of public sociology and invited us to honor them all. He connected American sociology with the wider world, focusing in particular on all issues of material want, political injustice, and social indignity.

While in his mind, Michael was always in vigorous conversations with social theorists, living and dead—Marx, Durkheim, Gramsci, Du Bois, Habermas, and others, in the classroom, he engaged generations of students with them. He taught students, but he also touched them. And these qualities he brought into his packed classroom at UC Berkeley, year after year, for fifty years—famously remembering every name in the large hall. 

The Pope of public sociology, Michael, connected sociology with itself. As the president of ASA, he connected sociologists in small colleges to those in large ones, and as president of ISA, he connected sociologists around the world to an ingrown America. He called for “global sociology” and founded Global Dialogue, publishing its issues in 17 languages.  

He wrote factory ethnographies based on his own shop floor experiences in Chicago, Hungary, and Russia. My husband Adam and I happened to be living for half a year in a small apartment in Moscow (Adam was doing interviews for his book, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin) in 1991 and Michael would travel into Moscow from the Arctic city of Syktyvkar, where he worked in a factory, and we would have dinner and drink vodka in our tiny kitchen.

Michael was also generous with his colleagues. When teaching at the University of Chicago, he had a colleague, the late Leo Goodman, who, during World War II,  designed a way to estimate the German supply of ammunition, and who is known today as the founder of social statistics. Then the father of two young boys, Leo, suffered two devastating blows—he was diagnosed with serious cancer, and upon this bad news, his wife filed for divorce. A week after this doubly devastating news, as Leo recalled to me years later, surprise still in his voice, “I heard the doorbell ring. I opened the door. It was Michael. He had a baseball glove and ball in one hand, and a baseball bat in another, and he asked me if my boys were interested in playing some ball.”

A few weeks after Michael himself was senselessly killed by a speeding driver, as he walked in an Oakland crosswalk, an anti-traffic violence rapid response group—including  Michael’s students—joined a vigil and protest, some holding signs, “Slow Down, Save Lives.”  They were carrying Michael’s spirit forward. And in the students and friends who survived Michael Burawoy, there is likely to be a memory of some depressed moment when they, too, heard a knock on the door, and it was Michael with some version of a ball and a bat.