I got the shocking news about Michael’s untimely, tragic death with a phone call the following day, compassionately delivered by Stephanie Canizales, a former USC graduate student who is now an assistant professor in Berkeley’s sociology department. I was numbed by the news, but I also happened to be in the middle of writing an email to Vicki Smith, who is now retired from UC Davis. She had been one of Michael’s PhD students with me back in the late 1980s, so I typed the news to her. I am not a particularly well-networked sociologist, but it is a revelation to me that I remain connected to Canizales and Smith through the influence of Michael’s extraordinary mentorship and his model of how to be a publicly engaged sociologist.

Michael Burawoy was many things: a brilliant teacher, an innovator and leader in sociology, and a publicly engaged intellectual. But here I want to focus on his mentoring practices.

We had already reflected on his uniquely dedicated mentorship in April of 2023, when we gathered for his epic retirement celebration. I was proud of him for retiring—many senior professors don’t know when or how to do this—and delighted that he got to see and hear testimonials of love and appreciation from the 80 former students he had chaired. He had to sit back and just take it.  On that day, we learned so much more about him, and I got a sense of how his mentorship had evolved over time. Back in our day, most of us knew very little about him. Some of us (including me) felt a little scared and intimidated by him, by the tough questions he would ask about the drafts of our papers, proposals, and chapters. I remember him asking these questions in his office, often with a big Cheshire cat grin. There was no pressure to answer on the spot, but still, his sheer theoretical intellect filled the room and added some weight to the whole graduate student experience at Berkeley. The stories that more recent graduate students mentees told at his retirement celebration suggested that he remained as rigorous as ever, but had loosened up over time, perhaps becoming more relational and jovial. Even fun.

As I have written elsewhere, my experience of graduate school days at Berkeley Sociology in the 1980s was alienating. While the classes and invited colloquia speakers exposed me to big ideas and books, the seminars were large and uneven. Many of the professors seemed disengaged, possibly depressed. All of the office doors on the 4^th floor of what was then called Barrows Hall were usually closed, and you could never tell if a human being was in there. In this sea of benign neglect, Michael was an exception. He was the first professor to show enthusiasm and substantive interest in helping me advance my research and writing. Having him as my mentor allowed me to write a dissertation about gender and migration, and he made all my work that followed possible. He shaped my subsequent research and writing, and the way in which I mentored graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.

At USC, where I worked for thirty years, I gave a lot of energy to the mentoring aspects of my job, both in graduate seminars and in guiding theses. It’s a very special thing to advise students and young scholars as they develop a project through a set of questions and a way to answer them, and I recognize how much of my mentoring practices came directly from my experiences as one of Michael’s PhD students. The core practices I have used with my mentees are ones I learned from him: writing a two to three-page letter to offer comments on drafts of chapters, papers and proposals, and delivering that letter and explaining these in a face to face meeting—and doing that many times over the course of one thesis. It’s quite a commitment. I also developed a dissertation group where it became an obligation for each graduate student participant to circulate work in progress, and comment on the papers of other PhD students currently under supervision (something very familiar to all of Michael’s former graduate students). And I consciously tried to develop the work of my mentees by mixing intellectual rigor with hard questions, kindness, encouragement, and patience, as Michael did.

Most, but not all, of my mentees were Latinx first-generation college students, many of whom had been overlooked by other professors and instructors. They are now thriving as sociology practitioners, and together with three of them (Emir Estrada, Veronica Montes, and Fatima Suarez), we’re writing a book about mentorship. As part of this project, they reached out to Michael Burawoy a couple of years ago and asked him to write a letter about his ideas on mentorship and his recollections of mentoring me. He responded with a beautiful, carefully thought-out letter. It is six pages long, single-spaced and cannot be reproduced here, and it is stunning for his attention to detail (making me feel special forty years later by actually remembering when and where he was when he read my first paper) and for the broad overview of how he himself changed his mentoring practice over the years. It was very moving to read this letter then, and more so now.  

Michael’s love of sociology is legendary, but his love of connecting to people and the world through sociology projects is really the heart of the matter.  As he wrote in this letter:

“…deep relations span our lives, among those between mentor and mentee. We are, after all, members of a privileged community born in graduate school, with sociology as our life-long vocation.”

Michael no longer walks this earth, but his presence reverberates in the way we practice a sociology dedicated to social change, humanity, and our students.