Seeds

“What didn’t you do to bury me / But you forgot that I was a seed.” – Dinos Christianopoulos, Greek poet

The participants were subtly subversive. They played by the rules of gaining tenure, but pushed boundaries in their teaching, the risks of their research topics, and the methodologies that broke the normative timelines and ownership of research. Participants knew they were forming cracks in the façade of institutions and institutional agents that couldn’t betray them because they were never connected.

One participant, though, imagined pushing herself toward “disappointing white folks,” reminding herself that playing safely must not be more important than playing to change the game. Another participant remembered the personal pain of institutional betrayal; people who greeted her like a blossom on the tenure track “didn’t ever talk to me when I was a student.” It seemed ok to disappoint the false colleagues who had done nothing to cultivate and tend to the seeds, to make sure they germinated and bloomed, to protect them through the seasons.

False colleagues will still be in the garden, as, in the future, everyone belongs and no one matters more than anyone else. But they cannot behave like invasive weeds.