Richard E. Aberle, 56
- Graduate student and adjunct professor, State U. of New York at Plattsburgh
- Receives food stamps, Medicaid, heating assistance
Mr. Aberle, who is married and has three children, took a one-third pay cut last fall when the dean’s office began to enforce a university policy that prohibits adjuncts from teaching more than three courses per semester. He says he will earn less than $18,000 this academic year.
He shares an office at Plattsburgh with a group of adjuncts who work a variety of jobs, including one who is a local cable guy and another who works weekends at JCPenny alongside one of his students.
“The administration hires people who are functionally full time but are paid part-time wages,” says Mr. Aberle, who is finishing his dissertation on the poetry of Robert Frost, for a Ph.D. in English. “We are the underclass of the university. The problem is nationwide, and it’s shameful.”
Robert Craig Baum, 41
- Ph.D. in philosophy, European Graduate School
- Receives food stamps, Medicaid, aid from Women, Infants, and Children program
Mr. Baum, who lives with his wife and four children in Quechee, Vt., calls himself “the migrant intellectual.” It’s not a metaphor, he says. It’s a vocation.
In 2005, he was working with illegal immigrants cleaning restaurants and movie houses in his area, while teaching at the Community College of Vermont and River Valley Community College, in Claremont, N.H., and finishing his doctorate at the European Graduate School, in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. At first, he didn’t think he had much in common with them. “I was still filled with cultural capital and self-delusion,” he says. But that changed when his food-stamps card came in the mail.
He sees parallels between his status as a contingent faculty member, whose work is not secure and requires him to travel long distances to different campuses, and others who are part of the working poor. “I don’t work 14 hours in the sun, but being on assistance has helped me realize that I have more in common with my poor students and custodians than I do with full-time faculty and the administration,” he says. “It was very painful to know that I was joining millions upon millions of people who are exploited workers.”
He is not teaching now because he is pursuing a career as an activist, trying to bring about change in higher-education labor.
Katherine, 42
- Master’s degree in business and office technologies in education, Chicago State U.; adjunct professor at two junior colleges in the Chicago suburbs
- Receives food stamps, Medicaid
Katherine has been working as an adjunct at the two Chicago colleges for 11 years, where she teaches introduction-to-computing courses. When her husband lost his job nearly three years ago, she tried to pick up extra classes at the colleges and began substitute teaching at a public school. When there still wasn’t enough money to support the couple and their two daughters, Katherine filled out an application for government assistance. But pride and her Republican values kept her from submitting the paperwork for three months.
“It took a lot for me to go ask for assistance,” she says. “The Republican in me was screaming, ‘No, you don’t take, you earn what you need. You don’t take from the common good. You provide for others.’”
She and her husband kept hoping he’d land a job, but their financial situation only worsened. Once she finally got up the courage, Katherine put on a pair of jeans and a casual shirt, and she took off her wedding ring, thinking it might help her fit in at the county public-aid office. She was relieved when she arrived and saw “a whole bunch of me": white, suburban housewives. “I didn’t feel so bad about my situation because I knew I wasn’t alone.”
Katherine says her father is probably rolling in his grave and her mother, a staunch Republican, is very disappointed. “She reminds me every day,” she says, “that her taxes are paying for my children to be on public assistance.”
Lynn, 43
- Master’s degree in fine arts, U. of North Texas; adjunct professor at two community colleges in Houston
- Receives food stamps, Medicaid
Lynn, a single mother of a teenage son, has been chasing her dream of landing a full-time academic job for more than a decade. She has been an adjunct professor for five years and received unemployment benefits during the summers until last June, when her colleges changed how they define her employment status.
The first time she went to the welfare office, she found about 300 people waiting in line, including men, women, pregnant women, crying children, and people who avoided eye contact. “I looked around me and I said, ‘Oh my god, how the hell did I get here?’” she says. “I sat there thinking, ‘Here we are, the dregs of society, with our hands out like Oliver Twist saying, Can we please eat?’”
She also dreads grocery shopping. “I would be mortified to be in the grocery store and have to pull out my Lone Star card,” she says. “It has the Texas flag on the card and it says LONE STAR in really big red letters. It’s like they’re trying to punish you by saying, ‘Hi, look at me. I’m on food stamps.’”