BY JAMES VERNON

Ed. note: On Monday, February 3, Michael Burawoy, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and lifelong activist, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the street near his Oakland home.  We in the AAUP join with our colleagues at Berkeley and world-wide in mourning his untimely loss and publish this remembrance by his colleague and fellow countryman.  For an obituary highlighting the reaction of sociologists world-wide go here.

Michael Burawoy

Just when we thought the world could not become any bleaker, we have lost–suddenly, tragically, and violently–one of the people who made everyone feel alive and hopeful that the world can and must become a better place.

Michael Burawoy was a fearless sociologist in the marxist tradition, a brilliant teacher, and a faculty activist with boundless energy who played a key leadership role in the Berkeley Faculty Association from 2014 to 2021.

Michael was an extraordinary advocate for the public university in systems of higher education around the world.  As President of the International Sociological Association, he began editing a blog on the deepening global crisis of higher education following the financial crisis of 2007/8.  Michael was most alarmed by the ways that a combination of austerity regimes and new market logics, imposed by an ever-expanding managerial class with inflated salaries, were changing the conditions of labor and study at universities.

In his tireless work for the Berkeley Faculty Association he ruthlessly exposed the damaging consequences of the erosion of public funding for the university’s missions of teaching, research and service.  There was rarely a committee, rally, or meeting of the Academic Senate that Michael was not asked to speak at.  His oratory, with its distinctive rhythm, fearlessly spoke truth to power and made us all recall the higher purpose of working in a public university.  His voice reverberated beyond our campus as he advocated for public reinvestment in higher education across the University of California, in the regional and national press, as well as in the halls and offices of Sacramento.

His faculty activism was characterized by a remarkable energy and the creativity of his ideas.  Every week, invariably over the weekend, he produced a newsletter that went out to BFA members.  He wrote nearly 200 newsletters, titled, after the satirical British TV show he watched growing up, “That Was the Week that Was”.  These newsletters brilliantly brought the problems of the neoliberal university into view.  Those newsletters created through language, a community of analysis, hope and resistance on the Berkeley campus.  Few who were there will forget his speech at an emergency meeting of the Academic Senate where he devastatingly described the then Chancellor Nicholas Dirks as a “spiralist,” one too invested in his own career and compensation to be trusted with the stewardship of our campus.

When Dirks resigned Michael waged a brilliant campaign to democratize the selection of a new Chancellor.  On Sproul Plaza he handed out buttons and leaflets proposing Robert Reich as a candidate around a manifesto to stop the privatization of the campus.  A proud member of UC AFT, which he joined in the 1970s, several decades before he became a member of the BFA, he was a fierce advocate for the rights of the growing ranks of contingent faculty as well as graduate student workers.  Long before the genocide in Palestine, he was vocal in his advocacy of the rights of faculty to support campaigns to Boycott, Divest and Sanction the state of Israel.  And as a recovering mathematician he tried hard to bridge the divide between faculty in STEM and those in the social sciences and humanities.

It took many conversations, and an obscene amount of Chinese food (which he adored), to convince Michael to take on a leadership role with BFA.  Typically, he did not think he was equipped to do the job!  An intensely modest and private man, he would have absolutely hated to read sentences like these about himself.  He was raised in a Jewish émigré family in Manchester, where he developed an unfortunate lifelong passion for Manchester United.  His other boyhood love was mathematics, which he studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge, graduating in 1968.  Yet, at the very time the European left (a term he hated) imagined revolution, Michael headed to the decolonizing continent of Africa and a newly independent Zambia, where the Anglo-American mining company hired him as an accountant.  This was where Michael witnessed the power of capital over labor, learnt how to do fieldwork, and decided to become a sociologist of labor processes.

Having visited relatives in the US as an undergraduate, he was drawn to the sense of possibility there that evaded him in the old world of Britain.  In 1972, he landed in Chicago to begin a PhD in Sociology.  Four years later he was hired by Berkeley, and remained here until he retired in 2023.  This is not the place to reckon with his enormous contributions to the discipline of Sociology as a scholar, or the critical role he has played in helping shape Berkeley’s own Department of Sociology.  Nor can we begin to do justice to his astounding work training a legion of PhD students, or his love of the classroom where he inspired generations of undergraduates with the clarity and rigor of his thought.

Right now it feels like the world and our campus cannot survive the loss of Michael.  We shall honor him by trying to live up to his vision of the public university and his insistence that all academic workers should have greater control over the labor process and be paid a sustainable wage.

James Vernon is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the board of directors of the Berkeley Faculty Association, a partner organization of the AAUP.