The first time I saw Michael Burawoy, he sped into my line of sight on a bike, three white stripes tracing down his arms and legs. We were meeting at Espresso Roma on College Avenue to begin a small, funded research project the summer before I began graduate school, something the department had set up as an enticement to enroll. I had wavered over whether to attend Berkeley, or at least I had been advised to act as if I was wavering. I had no idea who Michael was; his official online profile with the department listed his research interests as “CAPITALISM ON EARTH.” I made the mistake of interpreting the capital letters as signaling a lack of seriousness, the exact opposite of their true meaning. We were paired because I had applied with the intention of studying rural community colleges and Michael was interested in what he called the neoliberal university. As we spoke over coffee, he scribbled onto a napkin the outlines of the extractive higher education system that had been his life and which he hoped would become mine. For the next nine years, I wished the blur of any passing bike on College Avenue was Michael, and often it was.

The last time I saw Michael—though far from the last time I heard from him—was by accident. My partner and I were walking to a bar in downtown Oakland, and there he was, the most familiar person in an unexpected intersection. He was entering the crosswalk, dressed all in black with a suitcase coming home from BART and a flight before that. He had to fumble with his phone to pause the podcast playing on his hearing aid, though I couldn’t see what it was. “I’m always listening,” he said, before ignoring me and peppering Meghan with questions about her thoughts on my upcoming move. I patted his shoulder and suggested we relocate back onto the curb. He was killed 17 days later a short walk north and east along the lake from where we saw him, also in a crosswalk.

I could never write words that would fairly portray how steady his guidance and friendship were in the almost nine years between those two meetings, years in which Trump was twice elected, my body failed to behave, the sky turned a deep orange, and we were told to stay six feet away from one another. For five of those years we authored a newsletter on the state of Berkeley and the UC system, a partnership that grew out of our first conversation; he was my instructor in two theory seminars; we taught a class on pedagogy until a strike, to his delight, got in the way; he administered my master’s paper and my theory qualifying exam; and he guided me through a dissertation that by November of 2024 he declared, “in principle, complete.” It was his steady presence across those unsettled years that feels most important to convey, but hard to describe. He kept everything going, his advice and guidance appearing with a rhythmic regularity. Having Michael as a mentor was like living with a second heartbeat. He made every challenge easier, even if I didn’t always need him. And when I did need him, he was a lifesaver.

That gift of a second heartbeat is what I most want to share, but there are also moments that stand out. Something that can get lost in the assessments of his influence on intellectual matters was that he never acted like he was a big deal. He was once a few minutes late to a meeting early on in my time at Berkeley, before I was even officially “his” student. I was standing outside his locked office door not at all surprised to find a professor absent from where they promised to be when I saw him down the long hallway running my way—it was more than a jog, not reckless, but certainly too effortful to be for show. He wanted to talk to me and felt awful about being late and would use everything he had to shave a few seconds off that lateness. This was Michael, alive in his body to its greatest capabilities, using all his force for others. As an aside, Michael and I were once on a walk and somehow his middling athletic career came up. With humor-tinged pride he shared that he once won a big school race, and I immediately asked him if it was the 400 meters. I had never seen him so surprised, and he asked how I knew—I told him I knew because the 400 is the hardest race.

I only ever saw Michael tired twice. Once was my first year of graduate school. He was teaching my cohort’s classical theory seminar, and he showed up bruised and bleeding with his two front teeth missing. On his way to campus, he had been doored by a car and thrown from his bike, an act of violence he said happened to him about every five years. His teeth were back the next week. “The dentist found them bent backward and—POP—got them right back,” he recounted, his smile wide and oddly unremarkable. The second time was in May 2024, at his famed cake party, a celebration for his newly minted PhDs held in his tenth floor apartment near Lake Merritt. Less than 48 hours before, Michael had emergency gallbladder surgery (“a person only needs one bladder,” he told me and surely others, delighted by his joke). Anesthesia and doctor’s orders notwithstanding, in the morning, he had hooded his students and even secured cookies for the children who accompanied them across the stage. Of course the evening’s party would go on—that night he toasted and adored and held everyone, but eventually he sat and was still as the party swirled around him. It was the most obvious thing for someone in his condition to do, but I just couldn’t believe it, his superhuman energy had become so expected. I can still see, in my memories, his genuine smile fighting and refusing his exhaustion. His mind was too big for one body, his energy hot enough to melt steel, but it is the ends he put both toward that made him Michael.

I came to Michael the furnaceman long after he had retired from the factory. The research I know best and which he had me copyedit (as an excuse to pay me?) were his volume on Bourdieu, the fruits, he would joke, of a lost decade; his incredible memoir of his adventurous life, which he never promoted; and his work on Du Bois. Here is a small example of his generosity—he always credited his interest in Du Bois to a graduate student’s presentation. This interest in Du Bois was really a passion, and on the final day of the final seminar he taught at Berkeley, we staged his wedding to Du Bois. And he really did take Du Bois “for better or worse,” cherishing his hero’s example but not worshipping him or ignoring his many faults. This was the result of Michael’s central intellectual trait, which was so unusual it often came off as comical—he took people’s ideas very seriously. He would not allow the gloss of an ambiguous phrase, no matter how pretty, to reflect one meaning here and another meaning there. He wanted clarity and precision, not to best people but to get the best out of them. I can hear his voice articulating so many words—“cap-eh-tull-lis-emmmm”. “Soo-see-all-O-geeeee.” But in his academic labor, the words I will most associate with him are “specificity” and “particularity.” This precision is good science, but it also explains his ability to cultivate 80 dissertations. On my first project, an ethnography of rural activism, he once yelled that I was not taking my concepts seriously enough. He was taking them very seriously.

Serious, yes. But also quite funny. And mischievous. Michael mined the legacies of his Englishness that 50 years in California couldn’t erode to amuse his undergraduates. “Bloody brilliant,” of course. My favorite was “Bob’s your uncle,” a phrase he employed to explain Marx’s opaque understanding of the transition from revolution to communism. As he’d often say, great theories have great contradictions. But only he could make those contradictions so reliably funny. In regard to the “Bob’s your uncle” enigma left to us by Marx, Michael never committed the familiar error of believing his analysis could unravel it. But in his own way, he forced an answer through. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!” (from page 531 of Tucker, as Michael would know off the top of his head). Michael had few needs—a bicycle, an afternoon coffee from Milano, a way to watch Man United. But he had endless abilities—endless brilliance, bravery, and love. And he gave it all away. To be in Michael’s care was to be in a real utopia.