Mike Rotkin, a co-founder of the Community Studies Program, died on June 19th of leukemia at the age of 79. For many years, he was a lecturer and field study leader for our program, placing students with organizations, reading field notes, and guiding their senior capstone work. Mike’s commitment to the innovative vision of community studies was unwavering. He was a beloved leader, both on campus and in the broader Santa Cruz community, where he served as a five-time mayor of the City of Santa Cruz and spent more than 25 years leading the progressive wing of the Santa Cruz City Council.
Mike’s long-time colleague and former Community Studies Program Director Mary Beth Pudup articulates two ways that Mike’s vision has shaped our program. “The first was the idea that universities did not have a monopoly as sites of knowledge production. Mike had an intuitive understanding that communities were repositories of knowledge born from struggle, and an urgent task of the university was bringing that knowledge into the academy. The second audacious claim was that undergraduate students could be the messengers between community and the university.”
These radical ideas continue to animate community studies’ unique pedagogy. Students engage with critical scholarship in the classroom, assessing approaches to community organizing, liberatory social movements, and ethnographic methods, before augmenting their knowledge through a 6-month field study in which they work with and learn from an existing social change organization while taking extensive fieldnotes. Students then return to the classroom, bringing community-based knowledges back to the university to inform new understandings of emancipatory change. While experiential learning has become common, community studies follows Rotkin’s beacon toward a pedagogy that is both unabashedly political and maintains faith in undergraduates’ abilities to shape their own educational journeys by making unique contributions to academic knowledge.
Mike Rotkin lived this model of theory and practice in his own life’s work. He earned his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness in 1991. Rothkin’s dissertation, titled “Class, populism, and progressive politics: Santa Cruz, California, 1970-1982,” developed a theory of emancipatory political change that could account for his own success as a socialist in city politics, reversing over a century of conservative control and establishing Santa Cruz’s reputation as what UC Santa Cruz founding faculty member Bill Domhoff, along with Richard Gendron, called The Leftmost City.
In his dissertation, Rotkin described a strategy rooted in grassroots organizing and political membership in multiple community and labor organizations. The primary aim, he wrote, “is not the achievement by a group of any particular material goal such as more food or money, a better environment or improved health care. Such goals may be won in the process of an organizing struggle, but the goal of organizing per se is helping a group develop new relationships and experiences that allow them progressively to take more power over the decisions that affect them.” For Rotkin, organizing was principally about collective empowerment and the development of multi-dimensional political perspectives and social networks. This strategy, as his life’s work demonstrated, would build progressive coalitions that succeeded electorally by empowering ordinary people and their organizations.
This relationship-based approach to building coalitions guided his work in the Community Studies Program as well. According to Pudup, “Because of Mike’s myriad engagements in Santa Cruz and California, he worked his relationships on behalf of students, finding them field study placements they never dreamed of.”
Community studies lecturer emerita Andrea Steiner, who worked alongside Mike for many years, shared memories of what this strategy looked like in practice. Early community studies students spent their field study working shoulder to shoulder with migrant farm workers in the Salinas Valley. Because taking fieldnotes in this environment would be disrespectful, students would meet Mike, who would offer probing questions as they described their observations into his tape recorder. According to Steiner, “I’ve always remembered this story because it represented what a fine listener Mike could be, how he conveyed a “meet people where they’re at” openness long before that became the watchword of harm reduction, and how he had the politician’s gift of getting people to relax around him.”
Steiner also shared that “Mike himself wrote field notes throughout his life, and he used them to refine his activist practices, from community advocacy and leadership to union negotiating to teaching and so much more.” In this way, he carried out a key insight of the Community Studies Program, that theory, research and reflection matter for movement building, and that movement building matters for theory research and reflection. This thoughtful, committed and strategic approach to social change is what we hope community studies students will take with them into the world. We can learn from Mike’s legacy by weaving our critical understandings of the conditions of possibility for social change together with the grounded, empathetic dedication required to transform them. In doing so, his memory can be a revolution.
Rotkin’s passing has also been honored in the UC Santa Cruz news center & Lookout Santa Cruz.