By Stacey Patton
"I am not a welfare queen," says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.
That's how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she,
a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct
professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms.
Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities
courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of
the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients
include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose
advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.
"I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare," she says.
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Jeff Haller for The Chronicle
Elliott
Stegall, 51, who teaches English courses, picks up food assistance at
the WIC office in DeFuniak Springs, Fla. "The first time we went to the
office to apply, I felt like I had arrived from Eastern Europe to Ellis
Island," he says. "We all had that same ragged, poor look in our eyes."
Profiles
People with advanced degrees, from Texas to Chicago to Vermont, talk about what it's like to have to live on federal aid.
Graphic
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau grew up in an upper-middle class family in
Montana that valued hard work and saw educational achievement as the
pathway to a successful career and a prosperous life. She entered
graduate school at the University of California at Irvine in 2002,
idealistic about landing a tenure-track job in her field. She never
imagined that she'd end up trying to eke out a living, teaching college
for poverty wages, with no benefits or job security.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau always wanted to teach. She started working as
an adjunct in graduate school. This semester she is working 20 hours
each week, prepping, teaching, advising, and grading papers for two
courses at Yavapai, a community college with campuses in Chino Valley,
Clarkdale, Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Sedona. Her take-home pay is
$900 a month, of which $750 goes to rent. Each week, she spends $40 on
gas to get her to the campus; she lives 43 miles away, where housing is
cheaper.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau does not blame Yavapai College for her situation
but rather the "systematic defunding of higher education." In Arizona
last year, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed a budget that cut the
state's allocation to Yavapai's operating budget from $4.3-million to
$900,000, which represented a 7.6 percent reduction in the college's
operating budget. The cut led to an 18,000-hour reduction in the use of
part-time faculty like Ms. Bruninga-Matteau.
"The media gives us this image that people who are on public
assistance are dropouts, on drugs or alcohol, and are irresponsible,"
she says. "I'm not irresponsible. I'm highly educated. I have a whole
lot of skills besides knowing about medieval history, and I've had other
jobs. I've never made a lot of money, but I've been able to make enough
to live on. Until now."
An Overlooked Subgroup
A record number of people are depending on federally financed food
assistance. Food-stamp use increased from an average monthly caseload of
17 million in 2000 to 44 million people in 2011, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Web site. Last year, one in six
people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the
population—received food stamps.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau is part of an often overlooked, and growing,
subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans
with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some
other form of government aid since late 2007.
Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living
expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of
full-time academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay
for their children's college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay
they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes
up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or
welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves
trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries
alongside their students.
Of the 22 million Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010,
about 360,000 were receiving some kind of public assistance, according
to the latest Current Population Survey released by the U.S. Census
Bureau in March 2011. In 2010, a total of 44 million people nationally
received food stamps or some other form of public aid, according to the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
People who don't finish college are more likely to receive food
stamps than are those who go to graduate school. The rolls of people on
public assistance are dominated by people with less education.
Nevertheless, the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food
stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.
During that three-year period, the number of people with master's
degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to
293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance
rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by
Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew
on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the
U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
Leaders of organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think
that the number of people counted by the government does not represent
the full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report
their reliance on federal aid.
Even as the number of highly educated aid recipients grows, shame has helped to keep the problem hidden.
"People don't want their faces and names associated with this
experience," says Karen L. Kelsky, a former tenured professor who now
runs The Professor Is In, an academic-career consulting business. She
also operates a fund that helps graduate students and Ph.D.'s who are
struggling financially, most of whom are women with children.
"It's gone beyond the joke of the impoverished grad student to
becoming something really dire and urgent," says Ms. Kelsky. "When I was
a tenured professor I had no idea that the Ph.D. was a path to food
stamps."
It's difficult to talk about being on aid, says Matthew Williams,
cofounder and vice president of the New Faculty Majority, an advocacy
group for nontenure-track faculty.
"We regularly hear about adjuncts on food stamps," says Mr. Williams,
who received food stamps and Medicaid himself when he taught at the
University of Akron from 2007 to 2009, earning less than $21,000 a year.
"This is not hyperbole and it isn't theoretical."
Some adjuncts make less money than custodians and campus support
staff who may not have college degrees. An adjunct's salary can range
from $600 to $10,000 per course, according to the Adjunct Project, a
crowdsourced database about adjuncts' salaries and working conditions.
The national average earnings of adjunct instructors are just under
$2,500 per course, according to the American Association of University
Professors.
The Road to Assistance
Elliott Stegall, a white, 51-year-old married father of two, teaches
two courses each semester in the English department at Northwest Florida
State College, in Niceville, Fla. He and his wife, Amanda, live in a
modest home about 40 miles away in DeFuniak Springs, a conservative
bulwark in northwest Florida.
"This is where the poor folk live," says Mr. Stegall. "It's
small-town America. The people are nice, but there's no industry. The
only jobs are on the coastline."
Mr. Stegall is a graduate student at Florida State University, where
he is finishing his dissertation in film studies. At night, after his
3-year-old and 3-month-old children have been put to bed, he grades a
stack of composition papers or plugs away at his dissertation. (He's
writing about how Hollywood films portray Vietnam soldiers as psychotic
men who return home destroyed by the war.) His wife is starting a
two-year, online master's degree program in criminology offered by
Florida State. They receive food stamps, Medicaid, and aid from the
Women, Infants, and Children program (known as WIC).
Mr. Stegall has taught at three colleges for more than 14 years. He
says he has taught more than two dozen courses in communications,
performing arts, and the humanities and he has watched academic
positions in these fields nearly disappear with budget cuts. When he and
Ms. Stegall stepped inside the local WIC office in Tallahassee, Fla.,
where they used to live, with their children in tow, he had to fight
shame, a sense of failure, and the notion that he was not supposed to be
there. After all, he grew up in a family that valued hard work and
knowledge. His father was a pastor and a humanities professor, and his
mother was psychology professor.
"The first time we went to the office to apply, I felt like I had
arrived from Eastern Europe to Ellis Island," he says. "The place was
filled with people from every culture and ethnicity. We all had that
same ragged, poor look in our eyes."
He took a number, sat in the crowded lobby, and waited to be called
up to a plexiglass window by a brusque woman who screamed his name. The
Stegalls and the other parents took turns entertaining one another's
children. As he looked around, he thought about his situation as a true
academic would.
"I tend to look at my experience as a humanist, as someone who is
fascinated by human culture," he says. "Maybe it was a way of hiding
from the reality in which I found myself. I never thought I'd be among
the poor."
Mr. Stegall has supplemented his teaching income by working odd jobs.
He painted houses until the housing crisis eliminated clients. He and
his wife worked as servers for a catering company until the economic
downturn hurt business. And they cleaned condos along Destin beach. They
took the children along because day care was too expensive.
"I'm grateful for government assistance. Without it, my family and I
would certainly be homeless and destitute," he says. "But living on the
dole is excruciatingly embarrassing and a constant reminder that I must
have done something terribly wrong along the way to deserve this fate."
As he sat in the WIC office with his family, Mr. Stegall blamed
himself. He made a choice, he says, to earn a graduate degree even as he
saw the economy collapsing, the humanities under assault, and the
academic job market worsening.
"As a man, I felt like I was a failure. I had devoted myself to the
world of cerebral activity. I had learned a practical skill that was
elitist," he says. "Perhaps I should have been learning a skill that the
economy supports."
'Dirty Little Secret'
When asked if they believe that full-time faculty, administrators,
and scholarly associations know that adjuncts are receiving government
assistance, scores of graduate students and adjuncts who get public
benefits gave mixed responses. In an informal questionnaire
The Chronicle
distributed through AFT Higher Education, the New Faculty Majority, and
other groups that represent adjuncts, the aid recipients said that some
of those people know, some don't know, some don't want to know, and
some seem not to care.
At Yavapai, where Ms. Bruninga-Matteau teaches, a spokesperson wrote
in an e-mail that the college "does not look into the financial
backgrounds of its full- or part-time employees."
"If any employee were being helped or supported by a government
program, the administration at Yavapai College would not be privy to
that information," the spokesperson said. "In comparison to other
community colleges in Arizona, Yavapai College's adjunct faculty are the
third highest-paid in the state."
Numerous phone calls to Northwest Florida State College, where Mr. Stegall teaches, were not returned.
"It's the dirty little secret of higher education," says Mr. Williams
of the New Faculty Majority. "Many administrators are not aware of the
whole extent of the problem. But all it takes is for somebody to run the
numbers to see that their faculty is eligible for welfare assistance."
Public colleges have a special obligation to ensure that the
conditions under which contingent faculty work are not exploitative, he
says. "When public institutions fill those seats in the classroom and
tell students that they will be better off because of their education,
it is absolutely disingenuous for institutions to promulgate a
compensation structure of faculty to be on food stamps and other forms
of government assistance."
John Curtis, director of research and public policy for the American
Association of University Professors, says he regularly encounters
tenured faculty members who are unaware of the extent of the problem of
contingent academic employment. At the same time, many tenured faculty
members are outspoken advocates of improving working conditions for
their colleagues in contingent appointments, he adds. The AAUP has been
working with faculty groups, scholarly associations, and disciplinary
societies to raise awareness, Mr. Curtis says, so there is "no
legitimate claim to a lack of information."
Some leaders of scholarly associations say they are surprised to hear of graduate-degree holders being on public assistance.
James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical
Association, said in an e-mail that he consulted with his staff, and
"nobody has ever heard of this among our members or other historians."
"No e-mails, no postings or tweets," he wrote. "That doesn't mean
it's not out there. It just means that historians on public assistance
have not crossed AHA communications."
Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association, says
that he and his wife, Janet, qualified for WIC while they were in
graduate school in the late 1980s.
"It was great. It paid for Nick's baby formula and food, and was just
the kind of social-welfare program liberals should defend," he says.
"It was a temporary leg up until we were paid living wages. Janet's
mother also gave us her Social Security checks, so here's another cheer
for the idea of social welfare."
Mr. Bérubé says, though, that he is disturbed that adjuncts continue
to live for extended periods on these low wages, even after graduate
school. As for why scholarly organizations don't think about Ph.D.'s
being on food stamps, he says the answer is obvious.
"Everyone thinks a Ph.D. pretty much guarantees you a living wage
and, from what I can tell, most commentators think that college
professors make $100,000 and more," he says. "But I've been hearing all
year from nontenure-track faculty making under $20,000, and I don't know
anyone who believes you can raise a family on that. Even living as a
single person on that salary is tough, if you want to eat something
other than ramen noodles every once in a while."
Many people hold on to hopes that they'll be the one to get a lucky break, even as their economic situation deteriorates.
Marc Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University and the founding editor of
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor,
says that ego, identity status, and prestige may explain why so many
people refuse to abandon their aspirations of becoming full-time
professors.
"A big part of what we do in graduate education is foster this sense
of vocation and teaching for love and passion for what you do," says Mr.
Bousquet, who is also a contributor to
The Chronicle's
Brainstorm blog. "We socialize people into accepting the coin of
reputation as status capital. Some people are so deeply socialized into
the regime of payment by way of status that they are essentially trapped
in it for life."
The Role of Race
Ms. Kelsky, who helps graduate students and adjuncts who are homeless
or on aid, says the false portrayal of aid recipients as "welfare
queens" is an illusion that was created for political purposes.
"Racializing food stamps denies that wide swaths of the population,
reaching into the middle classes, are dealing with food insecurity," she
says.
Thirty-nine percent of all welfare recipients are white, 37 percent
are black, 17 percent are Hispanic, and 3 percent are Asian, according
to data from Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The majority of
the dozens of graduate-degree holders on aid who responded to
The Chronicle questionnaire are also white.
But race and cultural stereotypes play a significant part in how many of the academics interviewed by
The Chronicle are struggling with the reality of being on welfare.
Lynn, a 43-year-old adjunct professor at two community colleges in
Houston, who is on food stamps and Medicaid and doesn't want to give her
surname, says, "People don't expect that white people need assistance,"
she says. "It's a prevalent attitude. Applying for food stamps is even
worse if you're white and need help."
Kisha Hawkins-Sledge, who is 35 and a black single mother of
3-year-old twin boys, earned her master's degree in English last August.
She began teaching part-time at Prairie State College, Moraine Valley
Community College, and Richard J. Daley College of the City Colleges of
Chicago while in graduate school, and says she made enough money to live
on until she had children. She lives in Lansing, Ill.
"My household went from one to three. My income was not enough, and
so I had to apply for assistance," she says. She now receives food
stamps, WIC, Medicaid, and child-care assistance.
Like Ms. Bruninga-Matteau and Mr. Stegall, Ms. Hawkins-Sledge says
she had preconceived notions about people on government assistance
before she herself began receiving aid. "I went to school. I went to
grad school," she says. "I thought that welfare was for people who didn't go to school and couldn't get a good job."
Ms. Hawkins-Sledge says she grew up watching her mother work hard and
put herself through college and graduate school. "My mom defied the
stereotype and here I am in graduate school trying to do the same," she
says. And she, too, has worked hard not to become the cultural
stereotype of the black welfare queen.
"My name is Kisha. You hear that name and you think black girl, big
hoop earrings, on welfare, three or four babies' daddies," she says. "I
had to work against my color, my flesh, and my name alone. I went to
school to get all these degrees to prove to the rest of the world that
I'm not lazy and I'm not on welfare. But there I was and I asked myself,
'What's the point? I'm here anyway.'"
For Ms. Hawkins-Sledge, there is good news. She will begin a
full-time, tenure-track job as an English professor at Prairie State in
August.
Correction (5/7/2012, 10:24 a.m.): This article originally
misspelled the surname of a former tenured professor who now runs The
Professor Is In, an academic-career consulting business. She is Karen L.
Kelsky, not Kelsey. The article has been updated to reflect this
correction.
