Category: Academic Life & Labour

Twenty-Five Years on a One-Year Contract

Reading Time: 2 minutes

They gave me a certificate today. Paper. Official. My name typed neatly above the number twenty-five, as if the years were something they had kept safe for me, folded in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be handed back.

And a pin. Small enough to sit in a palm. A tiny gold thing, the size of a punctuation mark at the end of a very long sentence.

I held them both and smiled the way I have always smiled in those rooms — carefully, genuinely, with the grief tucked just behind the gratitude where no one needed to see it.

Thank you, I said. And I meant it. I meant every syllable of it.

Because the students were real. Every single one of them was real. The one who came in certain the world was the shape she had already been told it was — I watched her unbutton the certainty, slowly, like a coat she had been wearing too long.

The one who sat in the back row, saying nothing for half a semester, until the day he said something so precisely true that the whole room went quiet in the best possible way.

I was there for that. Twenty-five years of that. No certificate can hold what it was worth.

But here is the other truth, the one that also belongs in the room:

I drove to a building that was never quite sure it wanted to keep me. I parked beyond my official territory. I signed my name on a line that expired just before anything could be called permanent —

every year. Twenty-five times.

I could not plan a garden. I could not lean into the future the way people lean when they know the ground is theirs. I planned the way a guest plans. Carefully. Lightly. Always aware of where the door was.

And they needed me. Not abstractly. Specifically. My courses. My students. My willingness to sit on the committees, fill the gaps, and do the invisible work that held the structure up while they kept searching for the person they actually wanted in the position I was already doing.

They appreciated me. They meant it. They said so every year.

Appreciation and belonging are not the same thing.

I know that now. I have known it for a long time.

So today I hold the paper and the pin no bigger than a comma, and I hold both things at once — the genuine love of this work, the genuine grief of never being let all the way in.

Twenty-five years. Twenty-five contracts. Twenty-five times, I signed my name and made the expiry date mean something other than what it was.

A sheet of paper. A pin you could lose in the carpet.

This is what permanence looks like for a woman who was never offered it.

I do not regret the signing. The work was the work I wanted. The students were always a reason enough.

But I want the record to reflect this: I was never the placeholder they needed me to be. I was never pending. Never provisional.

I was in the classroom. I was the one the question landed differently on. I was the room that made it safe enough for someone to finally say the true thing out loud.

They cannot give me that on paper. They cannot fit it on a pin.

It was already mine. It was always mine.

Aquí estoy. Con veinticinco años. Con grietas, con gracia, con amor. Here I am. With twenty-five years. With cracks, with grace, with love.

The Woman Who Kept Signing

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI want to be honest about this.

I kept signing.

Not because I did not understand.
I understood earlier than I admitted.
I understood the shape of the arrangement,
the way the renewal was not a promise,
the way appreciation was not belonging,
the way the bar kept rising.

I understood.

And I signed anyway.

Because the work was the work I wanted.
Because the students were already there.
Because the alternative had no map
and I had a life organized around this work
and reorganizing a life is its own kind of cost
and I was not ready to pay it.

I am not asking for pity.
I am asking for the record to be full.

The full record includes this:
I was not only a victim of the arrangement.
I was also a participant in it.
I brought my best every year.
I renewed the goodwill that made renewal possible.
I made it easy to keep me contingent
by being so reliably, generously present
that the contingency became invisible.

I did that.

I am naming it not as failure
but as the complicated truth
of a person trying to do good work
inside a system that was not designed for her good.

She did good work.
She also helped the system function.
Both things are true.
She is not ashamed of either one.

She is only finished now.
Finished signing on other people’s terms.
Ready to write her own.

La mujer que siguió firmando ahora firma en sus propios términos.
The woman who kept signing now signs on her own terms.

The Shoulders Never Come Down

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis is not a metaphor.

I mean the shoulders.
The actual shoulders.
The ones that rose sometime in late March
and did not come back down
until the email arrived
and even then not all the way,
not fully,
because the email said planning to
and planning to is not the same as yes
and the body knows the difference
even when the mind decides to be grateful.

I have spent twenty-five years
with elevated shoulders.

I did not notice for a long time.
That is also what precarity does.
It becomes the baseline.
The tension becomes the normal.
You forget there is another way to carry yourself
because you have not carried yourself any other way
in longer than you can remember.

Someone touched my shoulder once,
a friend,
just a hand resting there,
and said: you are so tight.

I said: I know.
I did not say: I have been waiting
for a decision about my employment
every year for twenty-five years
and the body keeps the record
of every year of waiting.

I said: I know.
I tried to let it go.
The shoulders came down a little.
They came back up by April.

I am learning, now,
to notice the rising.
To put a hand on my own shoulder
and say: it is all right.
The waiting is almost over.
Not because the contract is secured,
but because I am no longer
organizing my body around their decision.

That is a different kind of settling.
The kind that comes from inside.

El cuerpo recuerda lo que la mente aprendió a ignorar.
The body remembers what the mind learned to ignore.

The Precariat

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI am not the only one.

I want to say that clearly
before I say anything else.

I am one of thousands.
Tens of thousands.
The people who teach the courses
the university could not run without,
who do the work the institution needs done
on terms the institution is not willing
to make permanent,
who are grateful for the renewal
because the alternative is nothing
and nothing is not a viable alternative
when you have rent and children
and a life that requires income
to continue being a life.

We are the precariat.

We are the adjuncts and the sessionals,
the limited term and the continuing-without-tenure,
the remote instructors and the contract staff,
the ones who built the open learning systems
and the online infrastructure
and the distance education programs
that expanded access for everyone
while our own access to security
remained carefully, structurally limited.

We are not a footnote.

We are a workforce.
We are a policy decision
dressed as an employment arrangement
dressed as flexibility
dressed as opportunity.

We are the infrastructure that is never on the letterhead.

I am naming us
not because naming changes the contract,
not because this poem reaches a boardroom,
but because the record matters
and the record has mostly been written
by the people whose names are on the doors
and whose tenure was never in question.

This is the other record.

Written by the ones who came back
every September
on terms that did not include
the dignity of certainty.

We came back.
We taught well.
We deserved better.

Somos el precariado. Somos también la razón por la que esto funcionó.
We are the precariat. We are also the reason this worked.

The Pin

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThey gave me a certificate today.

Paper. Official. My name typed above the number twenty-five
as if the years were something they had kept safe,
folded somewhere clean,
waiting to be returned.

And a pin.
Small enough to lose in the carpet.
The size of a period
at the end of a very long sentence.

I held them and said thank you.

I meant it.
I always mean it.
That is not the problem.

The problem is the math.
Twenty-five years.
A piece of paper.
A pin.

I taught from a screen,
from a spare room,
from a kitchen table when the desk was taken.
I taught people who drove three hours to get to campus
and people who could not get there at all,
and I was the reason they got through,
and I know that,
and I am not waiting for anyone else to say it.

But today they handed me something small enough to swallow
and called it recognition,

and I smiled,
and I meant the smile,
and I held both things at once
the way I have learned to hold both things at once,

which is one of the skills
they never put on the certificate.

Aquí estoy. Con veinticinco años. Todavía en pie.
Here I am. With twenty-five years. Still standing.

The Placeholder

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI did not know that was the word for it.

Not at first.
At first it felt like an opportunity.
A gap in the schedule,
a course that needed teaching,
a door that opened just wide enough
for someone to walk through,
and I walked through it
because I was qualified
and I was there
and the course needed teaching.

I taught it.

I taught the next one too.
And the one after that.
I built the expertise they needed.
I became the person
the department could not run without.

That is when I understood the word.

Placeholder.
The one who holds the place
while they look for the person
they actually intend to put there.

The search would open.
National. Competitive.
We want the best candidate.
And I would read the posting
and see my own job
described in language
that did not include me.

I applied anyway, some years.
I want you to know that.
I put my name in the pile
with the careful hope of a person
who has spent years earning the right
to stop being provisional.

And I was thanked for applying.

That is its own sentence.
It does not need more words around it.
Thanked for applying.

I held the place for a long time.
The place was well held.
I held it with both hands
and everything I knew
and everyone I cared about
inside it.

No one takes that back.
The holding was real
even when the place was never mine.

Sostuve el lugar. El lugar también me sostuvo.
I held the place. The place held me too.

The Course Shell

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI built it carefully.

Every module. Every instruction.
The welcome message I rewrote four times
to get the tone right,
warm but not needy,
clear but not cold,
the kind of welcome that says
you are in the right place
even if you are not sure yet.

I built the discussion prompts
so that the quiet ones could find an opening.
I built the assignments so that the person
with three jobs and a baby
could still do good work
in the hours that were actually available.

I thought about them.
I thought about them before they arrived,
which is a kind of care
that does not appear in any metric
and does not fit in any category
on the form where I rated myself annually
and was rated in return
by people who had never seen the course shell,
never read the welcome message,
never watched a struggling student
find their footing in the structure
I had built for finding footing.

The shell outlasted my contract.

I know this.
Someone else teaches in it now,
or a version of it,
the bones of what I made
still holding the shape of my thinking
while my name no longer appears
in the place where names go.

I do not need my name in that place.

I know what I built.
I know who it was built for.
The shell holds the shape of the care
and the care was always the point.

Lo que construí permanece. Aunque mi nombre no esté.
What I built remains. Even if my name is not there.

Slow Violence

Reading Time: 2 minutesIt does not arrive all at once.

That is what makes it slow.
That is what makes it hard to name.

If there had been a single moment,
a clear line between before and after,
a door that closed with a sound,
I would have known what to call it.

But it was not that.

It was the annual renewal
that kept the future always pending.
It was the decade of reached bars
and raised ones.
It was the committee work
that demonstrated commitment
without conferring rights.
It was the expertise that was used
and the belonging that was withheld.
It was the appreciation that was genuine
and the security that was not forthcoming
and the way those two things
coexisted for so long
that I stopped noticing the gap between them.

That is the slow part.
The not noticing.
The way the conditions became the weather,
the way the weather became the world,
the way you stop asking
whether the world could be different
because you are too busy
functioning within it.

I am noticing now.

I am naming it now
the way you name something
after you have finally stopped
being inside it,
after the distance gives you
the shape of the thing
you could not see
when it was all around you.

It was violence.

Not loud. Not sudden.
Not the kind that leaves a mark
anyone else can see.

The kind that lives in the shoulders.
The kind that negotiates with sleep.
The kind that sends you to the parking lot.
The kind that asks you to be grateful
for the conditions of your own precarity.

I am not grateful for that.
I am grateful for the work.
Those are different things
and I refuse to let them be confused.

La violencia lenta deja marcas lentas. Pero las deja.
Slow violence leaves slow marks. But it leaves them.

The One Who Went Quiet

Reading Time: 2 minutesYou stopped posting in week seven.

Not suddenly.
That is not how it happens.
It is gradual, the going quiet.
First the posts get shorter.
Then the tone shifts,
something clipped where there used to be curiosity,
something careful where there used to be reach.

Then nothing.

I noticed on a Thursday.
I noticed the way I noticed everything,
not because it was my job,
though it was,
but because I had been paying attention to you
since week one
and attention, once given, does not stop
because the gradual shape of absence
has become absence.

I sent a note.
Not the official one.
The human one.
The one that said:
I notice you have not been around.
No pressure. No judgment.
Just: I see the space where you were
and I am holding it open.

You came back in week nine.
You did not explain.
I did not ask.

That is a skill they do not train you for.
The knowing when not to ask.
The holding open without condition.
The understanding that some people
come back when they are ready
and what they need from you
is not a question
but a door that did not close.

You finished the course.

You passed.

I don’t know what week seven was.
I never will.
That is also the job.

Caring for what you cannot fully know.
Holding what you cannot fully see.
Staying, so they know the door is open,
even when you are teaching from a spare room
on a short contract
with no guarantee of next semester.

The door was always open.
I made sure of that.

Para los que se fueron un momento y volvieron. Los vi partir y los vi volver.
For the ones who left for a moment and came back. I watched them go and watched them return.

The Bar

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI reached it.

I want to say that plainly
before I say anything else.
I reached it.
Every time they raised it,
I reached it.

The specialization they suggested.
I got it.
The publication they implied was missing.
I wrote it.
The committee work they said demonstrated commitment.
I sat on the committees.
I sat on the committees for institutions
that had not yet decided
whether I was worth a permanent seat at the table.

I reached the bar.

And then I watched the thing I had always suspected
become a thing I could no longer pretend not to see.

They raised it.

Quietly.
Without announcement.
With the particular institutional grace
of people who have never had to say out loud
what they are actually doing.

One more credential.
One more year of experience.
One more thing the committee felt
the position required.

I climbed.
I reached.
They raised.

Twenty-five years of that geometry.

Here is what I know now
that I did not let myself know then:

The bar was never the point.
The bar was the mechanism.
The bar was the way a system
keeps a person reaching
instead of arriving,
keeps a person grateful for the climb
instead of angry about the ceiling.

I am not climbing anymore.

I am standing still
in the knowledge of what I reached
and what that reaching cost
and what it was worth.

It was worth everything.
The ceiling was the lie.

Ya no trepo. Me quedo donde sé lo que valgo.
I no longer climb. I stay where I know my worth.