A community remembers Mike Rotkin

Mike Rotkin had an outsized impact on Santa Cruz over the past 50-plus years, and Lookout is working to memorialize him and record the many lives he touched. Here, we collect stories, anecdotes and tributes from people around the community. Find out how you can share your memories here.

Elected officials

Feminist incarnate

“This is what a feminist looks like. ”

Mike Rotkin sported this T-shirt at just about every type of event – a Metro board meeting, a Democratic Women’s Club picnic, at campaign events. He didn’t discriminate. He literally wore his values across his chest. That’s one of the things I admired about him and why I consider him one of my mentors. 

I’ve known Mike for 20 years. Going back to my days as a community organizer working to address underage binge drinking. Mike was mayor and was instrumental in advancing the Social Host Liability Ordinance. Over the years, we kept in touch. He helped me establish an internship program at UCSC and connected me with many of his amazing students. 

I really got to know Mike when I decided to run for Santa Cruz City Council in 2020. We had many meetings in my “Shebshed” over the past five years. I didn’t always agree with his perspective, but I knew I could count on him for honesty and directness, for cutting to the heart of an issue, for truly listening and considering differing views. He coached me through some tough campaigns and helped me understand what it meant to be a “pragmatic progressive.” He didn’t just talk about compromise without compromising values or principles – he lived it. 

I will miss seeing him in that well-worn T-shirt, a walking statement of allyship. I’ll miss our regular “Shebshed” sessions, his long-winded but insightful stories, his sharp wit, his candor, his wisdom — and his warm, knowing smile.

Our community has lost a true public servant — someone who showed up, stood firm in his values, and never stopped doing the work. Santa Cruz is better because Mike Rotkin called it home.

Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson

Santa Cruz City Council

He spoke for those unable to speak for themselves 

Mike was a wonderful person who spent his entire adult lifetime working for a better Santa Cruz. His work at UCSC, guiding thousands of students over the years into public service and nonprofit internships has left a solid legacy.

As a mayor and city councilmember, Mike always spoke for those less able to speak for themselves, and moved the city in a progressive direction on so many issues.

In his recent capacity on the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission, Mike was a strong voice for public transportation and public transit. Mike’s commitment to serving the public in this manner was unmatched.

Will miss Mike like crazy.

Fred Keeley

Santa Cruz mayor

Mike was a hard worker

In his decades in local politics, many ideologies got attached to Mike Rotkin – socialist-feminist, progressive, Democrat, moderate, conservative. But to understand Mike is to know that what he most believed in was the importance of work. Hard, unglamorous work.  

He taught long after he could have retired. He kept at it through sickness, grading papers just days before his death. He did it because he wanted students to get experience working in nonprofits in our community. He also wanted nonprofits to use his students to increase their capacity to serve the most vulnerable in our community.

In his decades on the Santa Cruz City Council, most of what Mike did was the uncelebrated but critical work of running a municipality. He immersed himself in integrated waste management, water policy and transportation. He never missed meetings and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the issues because he read everything then sought out experts, people working on the front lines and neighbors for their perspectives. His opinions changed when others worked hard enough to effectively convince him through facts and advocacy.

When I was a young, newly elected councilmember, we were voting on what the goals of the city should be in the new General Plan. Words like sustainable and diverse were proposed. I tried to add happiness, citing the Declaration of Independence and Bhutan. 

To my surprise, Mike opposed it. He explained that happiness meant complacency and given the challenges facing our city, we had no time to be complacent. He won 4-3. Then he made a self-deprecating joke, patted me on the back and went back to work.

Our community is a better place because Mike Rotkin was never complacent. He did the work.

Ryan Coonerty

Former District 3 county supervisor

Mike Rotkin, excellent mentor

No doubt about it, New York City-born Mike Rotkin was one of the original Santa Cruz outspoken upstart progressive pillars. 

Back when the out-of-towners came to study with some of the most visionary University of California professors who migrated here to get off the publish-or-perish academic hamster wheel (much to the chagrin of the Republican-controlled sleepy beach town poobahs of that era), Mike Rotkin appeared from his shortened Cornell stint to follow visionary organic ag professor Bill Friedland to the promised land. 

And Santa Cruz of the late 1960s really was a promised land! I arrived more than a decade later to study with Mike. 

I was moving furniture in a beaten-up old pickup truck in San Diego and one day saw a story about socialist mayors in the United States in the Los Angeles Times. It was 1981. I visited Mike in his Community Studies office in 1982. 

Mike was a godsend for me, and so was the department. Mike Rotkin was a mensch of a mentor — understanding, amicable and open to anything I wanted to study under the rubric of social change.

Later, as a graduate student, I was twice a teaching assistant in his famous “Intro to Marxism” course.  Mike loved theory and he introduced us to the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and  Rosa Luxemburg. I can never thank him enough. 

Later, we often disagreed on local politics. Should we invite in corporate stores like PetSmart, Ross and OfficeMax to pay for local social service programs the council supported? I thought there were other ways to raise revenue. 

Our bigger falling out came in 1998 over the infamous Beach and South of Laurel plan that would expand the Boardwalk and displace many Beach Flats residents. I loved and respected Mike for many of his efforts around labor, preserving social services and truly trying to listen to his constituents. He was a big fish in a smallish pond, but it was a political pond in which he had a significant hand in creating. Rest in peace, my brother.

Chris Krohn

Former Santa Cruz city councilmember

He was my political partner and brother.

Words are hard to find to describe the loss of my friend and longtime Santa Cruz public servant Mike Rotkin. It’s difficult to remember a time in my life when I didn’t know him. 

For decades, Mike was a volunteer at gay pride – in his Day-Glo vest at the corner where the parade kicked off. When he wasn’t there a few weeks ago, it was a signal. 

We served seven years together on the Santa Cruz City Council in the 1980s, beginning with Mike’s six terms on the council and five terms as mayor. We formed a new majority on the city council at the time and it was a period of change for Santa Cruz. We won a court case to preserve greenbelts, expanded support for human services, fought offshore oil drilling, did the first pay equity and domestic partners programs, turned city attention to the neighborhoods, worked closely with labor organizations, fostered hundreds of units of new affordable housing and brought a new generation into city government. 

We brought different life experience and points of view to the table. In all that work, the relationships were close. Mike became like a brother. As with all family members, we learned to appreciate each other’s idiosyncrasies. 

Mike was the definition of the word mensch. He was my political partner for almost 50 years.  I will miss him every day, and will adjourn the state Senate in his memory when it can be scheduled. My heart goes out to Madelyn and his entire family.

John Laird

State senator

Thoughtful humanitarian Mike Rotkin

Mike was a mentor and advisor for me since 1975, when I chose Community Studies as my major at UCSC and then, of course, when I served with him on the Santa Cruz City Council from 1983 to 1988. It is ironic to look back at the two issues that were front and center for both of us – disturbing national energy policy and immigrants’ rights.

My field study was in energy policy related to the dangerous use of nuclear power. With Mike’s guidance, in 1976 I was actively organizing nonviolent direct action through the American Friends Service Committee and Resource Center for Nonviolence, to stop the construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. Now, to think that nuke’s life will be extended and is part of the expansion of fossil fuels has perilous, sword of Damocles implications. 

When on the council, Mike and I were asked to join a medical delegation to El Salvador. It was a delegation in support of those who had fled to Santa Cruz from San Salvador due to U.S. military interventions, death squads and widespread economic instability in the region. 

My husband, Ron, was relieved that Mike would be on the trip as I was in the first trimester with our third child and experiencing nausea. I had packed little baggies of snacks to keep my waves of nausea at bay. Mike drove, and as we headed to the airport, he reassured me that he’d be right there if I needed any assistance or cover if I needed to vomit. He added that he had brought some snacks as he had heard it helped with morning sickness. What a friend!

On our delegation, we toured clinics, a village that had relocated onto the surface of the capital’s landfill just to survive after the major earthquake in Guatemala, and a diplomatic visit with the then-mayor of San Salvador, Calderon Sol, a U.S.-supported and brutal strongman.   

After I had ceremoniously given the key to the city of Santa Cruz to the mayor in a gesture of friendship, I indicated that we, as electeds in our city, would be pressuring our national representatives to discontinue aid should his actions bring more oppression to his people. 

I felt guilty for this show of friendship. Mike was reassuring and thoughtfully said, “You do what you have to do to plant the seeds for justice tomorrow.”

Jane Weed (Pomerantz)

Mike never shied away from moral responsibility

My wife and I met Mike Rotkin in the late 1970s when we were working with the United Farm Workers Union legal department in Salinas. Mike joined a study group we had formed as we grappled with issues confronting progressives and the labor movement.

I remember Mike’s steadfast commitment to peace and justice and his many accomplishments as a city councilmember and mayor of Santa Cruz. Mike proudly self-identified as a Democratic Socialist and used to like to tell the story of being the socialist mayor of Santa Cruz at the same time that Bernie Sanders was the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Mike shared that he and Bernie had a telephone relationship and shared perspectives and actions during their tenures.  

In the early 1980s, during the wars in Central America, Mike and former councilmember and mayor Bert Muhly introduced resolutions condemning U.S. foreign policy in the region and denounced the U.S. support for the contras in Nicaragua. Some argued that international issues were not appropriate ones for the Santa Cruz City Council to address. Many, myself included, felt it was the moral responsibility at all levels of government to take public positions denouncing well-documented human rights violations for which the U.S. government and its surrogates were responsible. 

Mike never shied away from this moral responsibility.

One memory I will carry is when Mike, as mayor of Santa Cruz, asked me to help secure the presence of farmworker activist César Chávez to visit Santa Cruz. As I recall, this was in the early 1980s when César and the United Farm Workers were promoting a campaign to get rid of certain toxic and dangerous pesticides in the fields.

We arranged for a breakfast meeting at the Denny’s restaurant in Santa Cruz. Mike offered César and his entourage a warm welcome to the city of Santa Cruz and, without offering a formal “key to the city,” basically told César that he was always welcome in Santa Cruz and that the city stood ready to provide support to the goals and objectives of the farmworkers union.

As an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) after my years with the UFW legal department, I received UC Santa Cruz student interns whom Mike had counseled and trained as part of the Community Studies program that he helped found and direct.

In more recent years, when I served in the state Assembly and as majority leader in the state Senate, Mike and his wife, Madelyn, were strong supporters and never shied away from letting me know their opinions and concerns on pending legislation and budget issues. As an officer with the Democratic Women’s Club of Santa Cruz County, Mike continued to serve the community on many fronts after leaving elected office. 

Mike’s presence as a caring, informed activist was only part of his persona as a self-described feminist. Mike was a renaissance man who embraced the roles of educator, mentor, musician, songwriter, entertainer, committee member and organizational support person with equal vigor.  

Mike’s openness as a person, including his ability to listen to all viewpoints, won him the respect of friends and adversaries alike.  

We will miss Mike as our hearts go out to Madelyn, his family, and his larger family of community in Santa Cruz and beyond. 

VIVA MIKE ROTKIN!

Former state senator Bill Monning 

Mike understood the rules when it came to police

Mike’s passing was very unfortunate and a surprise to me.

One memory that always stuck with me about Mike while visiting his classes on UC Santa Cruz campus was his opinion of the protests over the past few years that ultimately blocked the entire entrance to the campus. He was supportive of those who chose to protest. He was involved in many protests himself over his lifetime. 

However, he never understood those who chose to protest and blatantly violate the law and then expected not to be arrested and held accountable. He didn’t understand those who got arrested and blamed the police for their actions. 

He encouraged people to protest and voice their opinions, but if they wanted to violate the law, they should be prepared to go to jail and suffer the consequences. That was a choice they should consider and make themselves. But don’t blame the police when you get arrested. 

When he was involved in protests, he made that conscious decision each and every time, but accepted the consequences for his actions.

Bernie Escalante

Santa Cruz chief of police

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Students

Best teacher I ever had

Mike Rotkin was a good friend and by far the best teacher I ever had. He had more influence on probably thousands of students than all of our other teachers combined. I learned from Mike that change can happen, and it’s most likely at the local level. This can be taxing the rich to help the poor; it can be protecting farmland and forest land from development.

Eesha Williams, editor

The Valley Post

Brattleboro, Vermont

I joked Mike would be mayor for life 

Our beloved Michael Rotkin has died, truly the greatest mensch, activist, public servant and true-blue friend in Santa Cruz. 

Mike has been a big deal in Santa Cruz since 1969. I met him in 1979, when I first transferred to UCSC as a Community Studies student. There was a time when we all joked he’d be mayor here for life. The first “socialist feminist” mayor, and certainly the finest one. There isn’t a single good thing in our town and my neighborhood that wasn’t part of Mike’s legacy.

I knew him as a student who came to UCSC to learn the principles of politics and organizing. Everyone loved him. He wanted so much for each student to find their place in transforming the world. He was always with us. He and I were both veterans of labor and civil rights, Vietnam protests, and the respect we shared for living through it without throwing in the towel was palpable. Keep your eye on the prize! Be stoked about each new day. That was Mike. He was attracted to possibilities and integrity. 

If you were campus staff and young faculty — whew, no one worked harder for union organizing and recognition of labor on campus, and for all public servants in town. 

Have you taken our city bus, sat by the fire at Garfield Park library, strolled downtown, biked up the coast? Found yourself in countless great community gatherings? Known you had a friend in your corner? You have been touched by Mike’s work. He saved this town through his organizing efforts after Prop 13 passed.

He was the folk spirit of power to the people, for sure. That twinkle in his eye. Love you, Mike. Your fight and integrity was the best of Santa Cruz. 

Susie Bright, author and editor

MIKE ROTKIN ON SANTA CRUZ POLITICS: Read his columns for Lookout’s Community Voices opinion section here

I’ll never forget Mike on the ground organizing to save Community Studies

I was a Community Studies graduate, class of 2011. Mike was my professor for several courses and my advisor during a six-month, full-time field study organizing for labor rights with domestic workers in New York City. His influence on my education, career and worldview was profound — more than I even realized at the time.

I was getting started in Community Studies during a time when UCSC was threatening to cut it as an undergrad major (2009). I’ll never forget Mike on the ground organizing with his students to save our department. He helped facilitate and participate in meetings, protests, a coalition and an active Facebook group for organizing students, staff, constituents and alumni. We were organizing to save a major that educated us about community organizing — it was real-time, applied learning at its finest. It was such an invigorating time in my development as a young adult. 

Mike’s teachings on the impact of oppressive systems and structures on individuals’ daily lives continue to shape my work today as a public school speech pathologist. After reading the news of his passing on Lookout, I found myself digging through old emails from 2010. I had forgotten just how frequently we corresponded, and how deeply he supported me through that formative time.

He offered thoughtful feedback — not just on the day-to-day work I was doing, but on the broader social and economic implications of that work. He had a trip to New York while I was on my field study, and he made time to meet me for coffee, helping me process what turned out to be a life-changing experience.

When I applied to graduate school in 2013, Mike wrote me a generous, detailed letter of recommendation — one of many, I’m sure, but it meant so much. Educators like Mike have a lasting ripple effect. His care and commitment made a difference in my life, and in the lives of so many others.

Thank you for everything, Mike.

Elena Kingston (Rossman)

Mike helped shape my impression of the world

I was a Community Studies major and Mike was my advisor (I think he was everyone’s advisor for the major then?). Meeting with him was often cathartic, and he truly helped shape my political and social impression of the world. 

When I shared my grievances, having grown up in Santa Cruz and working two jobs as a “working class” student and frustrated by the narrative of UCSC as “on the hill” and the issues we were helping as other, he pushed me to see how the community was one community and how intersectionality and oppression work. 

The views he shared, questions he asked me to ask myself, support he provided and great academic structure he provided were integral to me being who I am. He went above and beyond often, and I know the huge impact he had on me was not unique – there were no students who didn’t truly believe he was kind, generous, and helpful. 

He was this person to everyone, and we are all better for it. 

During my coursework, I completed my field study at the needle exchange/drop-in center, which had a regular cycle of Community Study field work folks – he helped make sure that program was staffed with compassionate, educated people who worked tirelessly to protect the most marginalized in our community. After graduating, I continued volunteer work with the needle exchange, and when I tried to educate and train the police department, I reached out to Mike. He helped with introductions, ideas and support so folks in the community could be better protected. 

When I applied for graduate school and we hadn’t connected for a couple years, he didn’t hesitate to write a very thoughtful letter of recommendation. That was just the kind of person he was. 

While I didn’t keep in touch, I know I’m not alone in grieving a huge loss to the community, and grateful for the bedrock of humanity our community had the privilege to love and know. 

My heart breaks for his family and friends, and I hope we can all do our best to live the values he shared with us. Thanks for organizing memories and more. 

Penny Morris 

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Friends and fellow activists

He had an abiding love of humanity

Though deeply political, Mike approached everything with an unwavering belief in the fundamental goodness of the human heart and a profound love for humanity. 

This was the wellspring of his longevity and impact as an activist, teacher and leader. 

At once profound and playful, Mike was a true 21st-century polymath – his passions ranged across science, art, music, literature, the culinary world and outdoor adventure. He relished exploring it all, especially when it meant connecting with others in meaningful ways all around the world. 

His spirit will always be present in the place he loved most: Santa Cruz.

Mark Stephens

Everyone picked up the phone when Mike called

“Dear Sisters” is how Mike Rotkin addressed every email to us, his female colleagues on the Democratic Women’s Club board. He was a self-described feminist and socialist (and had T-shirts proclaiming it), and on our board for more than 20 years, most of that time as the only male. We welcomed his experience and insights, and benefited from his relationships throughout the county. 

We never doubted his ability to design a policy program, because everyone picked up when Mike called. People who worked and collaborated with Mike for 40 or 50 years will have great stories to tell. We were friends and colleagues for only two decades, and of all his many wonderful traits, the one that stays with me is his dismissal of accolades or titles. A year ago, when we talked of having another volunteer take the lead in planning to give him a break, he said, “Peggy, I don’t care what position I have or if I have any title at all; the important thing is the work. Let’s do the work.” 

There’s still a lot of work to do, and I’ll miss Mike not being part of it every day. 

Peggy Flynn, Democratic Women’s Club

Mike devoted himself to repairing the world

I first met Mike Rotkin on a dusty softball field at UCSC in the early 1970s. He was a hell of a third baseman — quick hands, sharp instincts — and he hit clean, mean line drives that always found the gaps. We became fast friends, bonding over Dylan lyrics as easily as softball and politics. We both knew every word to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and sang it like it was gospel — our version of prayer. We were both activists. Mike cheered my board at Food & Nutrition Services, which is now Community Bridges. I was the executive director.  

He and his first wife, Karen Rian, and I spent many times together sharing 1960s stories. I once tried to teach him how to milk a goat; it was unsuccessful —  he claimed his hands were too big. 

Others have rightly chronicled Mike’s decades of political and social activism, but what always stood out to me was something deeper. Though not a religious person, Mike lived with a quiet, relentless devotion to tikkun olam — repairing the world. 

Whether in the classroom, city council chambers or just among friends, he carried that commitment with grace, humor and an unshakable belief that we all had a role to play.

Sam Karp

52 years of friendship

Mike, it’s been an interesting 52 years that I’ve known you. From the hearings on Lighthouse Field to my years on the Democratic Central Committee. 

It was a privilege to have known somebody who for so many years strived to make Santa Cruz a better community for all.

I will miss our periodic conversations and just the idea that there was somebody who worked so diligently to make it not only a better community, but a better world. 

Joe Hall

The voice of reason in the room 

I first met Mike circa 1975. He was married then to one of the founding faculty members of the UC Santa Cruz Women’s Studies program who became a friend (Karen Rotkin/later known as Karen Rian). 

I was an undergraduate reentry transfer student. Over the years, Mike and I met again over and over in different aspects of our lives. We mourned Karen’s death together. We conspired with others to make Santa Cruz a better place for all people. 

After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, we served on Vision Santa Cruz together. Mike and I didn’t always agree, but I came to have a great deal of respect for him. 

He often was the voice of reason in any room and the penultimate organizer, activist and strategist. Mike had many interests and talents — he truly lived a full life. In wonder, I watched his political evolution. 

Beyond that, Mike Rotkin simply seemed part of the fabric of life in Santa Cruz. To say he will be missed is an understatement. My sincerest condolences to his family and loved ones. 

Thank you, Mike.

Ciel Benedetto

Fly with angels, Mike, and join the cadre of old lefties

I know Mike all the way back from his days at Cornell, where he was an offset printer at the anti-war/draft resistance office in Ithaca, New York.  I was volunteering there during summer vacations, visiting my father, who was a professor at Cornell.

I attended SDS meetings, made posters, went to the dances, went to Woodstock, with a group of young men in an old mail truck.  We went to marches in Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon, where I was tear-gassed.  I was friends with people who were nine to 11 years older than me – they were college students, and I was still in middle and high school living with my mom and stepdad in Westchester County.

I moved to Santa Cruz in 1980. Later on, I was a Community Studies major at UCSC. When it came time to graduate in 1988, I had to have a thesis committee, and Mike was one of the members.

We saw each other throughout the years after that, informally. I was surprised and deeply saddened to learn of Mike’s passing. He was such a vital part of the community, as a professor, a city councilmember and mayor.  

I can still hear his voice, hear his laugh, and see his smile and eyes crinkle.

May he fly with the angels, and join the cadre of old lefties, Bill Friedland, my father, Doug Dowd, and stepfather, Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist.  

With fists raised high, they are together again, and in the words of the Industrial Workers of the World wobblies, “Dare to struggle, dare to win.”

Jenny Dowd

Prunedale

A true Renaissance man 

I was graced with knowing Mike for over 50 years of friendship, collaboration and adventure. This still wasn’t enough time. He was always so generous with his time and knowledge, and clearly dedicated to public service. He was truly one of a kind. A Renaissance person. 

I met Mike for the first time in the fall of 1971 on Western Drive next to my bedroom in my garage shed at 1 a.m. Mike had built a darkroom to make negatives to use with the offset printing press for the next edition of “Loaded” magazine, which opposed the Vietnam War. I was immediately intrigued by him. 

In time, he taught me to run the press. His ways of teaching were spot-on, with some exceptions, of course. Then there was our involvement with the New American Movement, an organization to create models of socialism. Mobilizing youthful energy for a hopeful future was clearly a calling for him. 

Part of my adulthood was shaped by our wonderful and thrilling river rafting trips and backpacking adventures watching meteor showers and sharing the beauty of the Sierras, discussing the latest science developments of cosmology. We shared indulgent Thanksgivings and birthday meals together on the wharf. 

Many building projects on each of our old houses were great learning experiences for both of us. We co-owned and shared a lawnmower, enjoyed shooting hoops in his backyard, and he loaned me his car to go to a job interview. We named our first-born Michael Lucius after Mike. We are grateful for his sweet and folksy mayor’s proclamations for our kids’ bar mitzvahs and for my mom’s 100th birthday. 

He taught me that LGBTQ rights were everyone’s rights and brought me back into ACLU activism. I treasure our working together at the Grey Bears fix-it cafés and even those heated discussions and disagreements over local politics. Mike’s friends were varied and I benefited from them all. I admired Mike’s cool, calm reasoning and rationality, which was a good influence on my impulsive nature. 

Mike had a profound impact on my life. His pearls of wisdom were profound: a can-do belief and attitude and to never give up. He helped me know you’re never alone working together in a community which gives us power, strength and support. 

The world needs more Mike Rotkins now more than ever.

Ron Pomerantz

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UC Santa Cruz

Mike knew how to make things work

When I was chair of the UCSC Writing Program, Mike Rotkin was my go-to guy on the lecturers union, UC-AFT Unit 18. The department had the largest concentration of lecturers on campus, and Mike gave me much-needed advice on how to get lecturers out-of-the-box teaching appointments. Given a somewhat inflexible university administration and an equally inflexible union contract, this meant working creatively to arrive at solutions. 

In each case, Mike’s goal was pragmatic. He wanted to *make things work* so that people got what they needed without defying principles. It was one of many valuable approaches I learned from him and from a group of his contemporaries (Carol Freeman, Don Rothman, Conn Hallinan – all now sadly gone) who, together, helped create the ethical environment prized by so many longtime lecturers at UCSC.

When I became provost at UCSC’s Merrill College, I was fortunate to be able to hire Mike to reboot Merrill’s field study program, shuttered for 20 years due to budget cuts. I also enlisted him to get alumni and emeriti to reconnect with their college, and he was, of course, a natural at it. 

But it was as a teacher for Merrill that he really made his mark. 

Mike sent hundreds of students out to work in local agencies and nonprofits – thousands of hours worth of volunteer labor – and taught them how to observe how those agencies worked from the inside. Students loved the class and the opportunity to do meaningful work off campus, work that might shape their future lives. 

And they loved Mike, who often worked with them in subsequent quarters to deepen their experience. 

Mike often retold the popular parable of the river, used in Community Studies and other disciplines. It goes like this: Citizens in a community notice babies floating down the river. One by one, they rescue the babies. Soon, they form committees to determine better baby-fishing techniques and more efficient methods of organizing the efforts. 

But the question, Mike reminded us at every turn, is not how better to rescue floating babies. It is: Why are babies floating down the river? 

It was a classic Mike story, getting right to the heart of his teaching, and, of course, his success in the city. If you discover how the system works upstream, you can make it better all the way down. 

Mike told my successor, Aims McGuinness, he would keep on teaching Merrill Field Study as long as he could. He did, turning in the final grades for his last course just a few weeks before he died. 

We only wish he could have stayed on forever.  

Elizabeth Abrams, UCSC Writing Program professor

Former Merrill College provost

I wish we had done more interviews with Mike

I was pleased to see that Wallace Baine drew on my 2013 oral history with Mike for Lookout’s terrific article. Those interviews were part of a larger oral history — coupled with interviews with Bill Friedland — about UCSC’s Community Studies department. Although the transcript of Mike’s interviews filled more than 450 pages and did include information about his experiences before Community Studies, that oral history didn’t begin to approach the breadth and depth of his varied contributions to the communities he loved. 

I always wished we could have done an additional series of interviews just focused on Mike’s own activities and accomplishments as an activist, a teacher, a labor and community organizer, a politician, a musician, a family man and a friend to many.

There’s so much I could say about why I loved, admired and appreciated Mike. Wallace has already eloquently articulated much of it. (And Chris Krohn’s recent “Talk of the Bay” interview with Mike, which aired on KSQD, gave listeners an additional window into his continuing lively civic engagement right up until very near the end.)

Perhaps I’ll just share one quick memory, from the years when my husband and I (both then UCSC lecturers) served with Mike on the coordinating committee of the UCSC local of UC-AFT, the lecturers and librarians union. Mike, who was an essential mover and shaker in that union at both the statewide and campus levels, always had much information to report and many issues to raise at our meetings. He had so much to say, in fact, that everybody in attendance always knew to expect a long verbal firehose blast from him as soon as we sat down. 

Almost invariably, he’d launch into his voluminous remarks by saying, “I’ll be brief” — and while I do believe that was his genuine intention, we all knew better. 

Mike always had a prodigious amount of detailed relevant information at his fingertips, and that man could talk. But the eye-rolls were always amused and affectionate — because when Mike talked, it was never just to hear himself talk; you knew you were going to learn something useful. And also that if you, too, had something to say, he would eventually listen, attentively and respectfully.

Sarah Rabkin – Juniper Editing

Coaching, teaching, editing & consultation for writers

Mike was the heart and face of the Community Studies program

Although students took classroom courses from all of the faculty in the Community Studies major, I think for most students, Mike was the face of the program.  

He helped them find the field study placements that are the heart of the major.  He read and commented on the field notes that they took over the course of their six months away from campus, as well as the two substantial papers that they wrote while in the field. This itself was a major task, involving reading hundreds of pages of student writing. And he was always there to help troubleshoot, if things went awry in the field study, as they occasionally did. 

Mike was the only faculty member I have ever known who (before the ubiquity of cellphones) gave students his home phone number and told them he could call them anytime before midnight. Truly above and beyond — and students knew it!

David Brundage 

UCSC emeritus history professor

Did Mike ever sleep? He helped lecturers strike for continuing appointments

Mike Rotkin was the lion of UC-AFT, the union for lecturers and librarians at the University of California.  

When I arrived to teach at UCSC in 1998, I was frankly stunned at the academic caste system of the largest public university system in the world.  Mike had, with his usual joy and purpose, chosen to be a lecturer rather than a ladder-rank professor — though he had the opportunity –  so he could focus on teaching. 

It was not a naïve decision. Those who knew him realize what a consequential choice this was for others, and others were always Mike’s focus. 

His famous course in activist fieldwork created the template for other institutions. And his tireless work building UC-AFT into the powerhouse it is today resulted in one of the strongest contracts of non-tenured teachers nationally. Lecturers had very few rights when it came to rehiring and job security. Mike undertook to shift that dynamic one contract campaign at a time, culminating in the historic University of California-wide strike of 2003, during which he was chief negotiator. 

He helped lead us lecturers to successfully strike for continuing appointments. Yes, there were compromises he had to make. 

I was one of the upstart activists who were frustrated at the compromises. It would now take lecturers six years working in the same department to win one of these coveted continuing appointments. But watching Mike, I learned that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and I vowed that if I ever reached continuing status, I’d work just as hard as Mike to help other pre-continuing folks join us. 

Mike and I worked gracefully and socratically across our differences. I studied his moves as our local’s long-time president and statewide UC-AFT VP for organizing. I eventually stepped into both of these roles myself.  

It was hard to imagine that Mike wouldn’t be our “perma-prez.” He was so competent.  But he mentored new leaders, fed us history and tactics, and modeled the kind of tireless energy — did Mike ever sleep? — we know is necessary to begin to escape the professional and emotional entrapments of the academic caste system. 

We are no longer called “non-senate faculty.” We are no longer defined by what we are not (imagine calling a woman a non-man). Mike’s work helped us escape Plato’s famous dark cave. 

He is one of those bright necessary lights you can’t imagine dimming. And now we’ll have to carry that light forward somehow without him.  

Roxi Power

No matter how busy he was, he helped

Among the many things I appreciated about Mike Rotkin were the ways he came through for students and colleagues. 

When he was the field study coordinator for Community Studies, he supervised more than 100 students at a time, reading their field journals and mentoring them while they served community groups — as well as staying in touch with each of those organizations and agencies. On top of that, he supported student print and radio journalists, providing them with contacts and advice, giving them interviews, placing ads in their publications. 

Though he was doing all that and more on campus – while serving on the Santa Cruz City Council – when someone with a particular set of skills was needed to serve as the chief negotiator for the union that represents lecturers in the UC system statewide, Mike stepped up. It was an enormously demanding role, with high stakes both for faculty not on the tenure track and for the students they taught. I know that many of us remember moments when a student or a faculty member showed up with a problem we couldn’t address; we’d take a deep breath, look at each other, and say, “Well, maybe Mike could…”  

No matter how busy he was, most often he could help – and did. 

Roz Spafford teaches creative writing for Kresge College; she also was the co-chief negotiator for the UC-AFT in the 1980s

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