Let me tell you what twenty-five is.
Twenty-five is the number of times
I signed a document that expired.
Twenty-five is the number of Septembers
I prepared a new cohort
for a course I was not sure
I would still be teaching in January.
Twenty-five is the number of times
I updated a syllabus,
redesigned an assignment,
read the new research,
learned the new framework,
showed up current and ready
for a position that was not prepared
to show up permanently for me.
Twenty-five.
People say: that is a long time.
They mean it as a compliment.
They mean: you must really love the work.
I do.
That is not the point.
The point is that twenty-five years
is long enough to have built something.
Long enough to have tenure.
Long enough to have a pension accumulating,
a name in the institutional memory,
a seat at the table where the decisions
about the courses you built
are being made.
I built something.
For twenty-five years I built something.
The institution holds it now
under someone else’s name
or no name
or the name of a process
that does not remember
whose hands made it.
Twenty-five.
They gave me a certificate.
They gave me a pin.
I gave them twenty-five years.
I am not doing the math out of anger.
I am doing it so the record is accurate.
So that anyone who reads this
understands what twenty-five years
of contingent labour looks like
from the inside of it.
It looks like this.
It always looked like this.
Veinticinco años. Que conste en el registro.
Twenty-five years. Let it be on the record.
