Capturing the experiences of so many in higher education
Posting with permission:
A beautiful poem that captures the impact and experiences of so many in higher education as drastic economic cuts set in.
Crossing
You could have stayed.
Swallowed the tension,
worked around the erasures,
made yourself smaller
to survive the narrowing space.
You could have stayed
and called it dedication.
Let them call it flexibility.
Let them recast what you built
as something to be “streamlined”.
But you didn’t.
You saw the tide turning,
felt the slow undoing —
not just of the work,
but of the values
that once gave it life.
You watched familiar ground
lose pieces of itself
in the name of recovery,
efficiency,
“moving forward”.
Watched the care, the depth,
the human weight of it all
get flattened
into checklists and quick wins.
You knew
that staying meant disappearing.
So you stepped.
Not into comfort,
but into air —
a future shaped
not by crisis or compromise,
but by your own compass.
That’s courage.
Not loud,
but true.
You left not out of bitterness,
but out of love —
for what once was,
and what you could no longer
pretend was still there.
Let them inherit
what they think they want.
Let them simplify
what they never really understood.
You carry something
they cannot reclaim —
the memory of when
this work had soul.
And the clarity
to know when it no longer did.
There will be days
when the ache returns.
When silence follows
where respect should have been.
That’s alright.
Let it pass through.
Because the road ahead,
wide, and unfinished,
is yours.
And one day,
with your hands in new work,
in new light,
you’ll look back
not in regret,
but in strength,
and say —
That was the day
I chose myself.
(Written by Amanda Whitehead)
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