Ending welfare as we know it
Rob Price

So there I was, walking around Alfred University's Knight Club, holding an eight-month-old baby boy on my hip and waiting for the university's 2007 Reilly Lecturer, Vivyan Adair, to begin her address.

The baby's mother, one of my wife's students, had handed him off to me after I had expressed some admiring words regarding his cuteness. Then she had split for parts unknown, leaving the stroller and several cases of baby equipment behind. "I'll just be right back," she'd said.

I was starting to look forward to that. The baby, whom I'll call Ajax, was starting to get fussy and looking at me with a vaguely suspicious expression on his cute baby-face. Meanwhile, I was pretty certain his seat was damp. I looked at the stroller and suitcases, wondering how complicated it would be to find a fresh diaper. Where, if I found them, would I do the changing? Could I even remember how to change a diaper?

Fortunately, I didn't have to face that issue. The mother returned and scooped her child away from me, and I found a seat to listen to Professor Adair's lecture.

She is founder and director of Hamilton College's ACCESS Project and was on the AU campus to talk about this amazing effort to help people on welfare work their way out of poverty through a college education.

The ACCESS Project gathers lowincome - "profoundly" low income, according to its literature - parents in central New York in an academic environment and supports them and their children while they are introduced to the liberal arts. The idea is to provide individuals with the wits and skills to qualify for more profitable work than the dead-end jobs that lock them into minimum-wage hell.

And Adair herself is one of the best examples of how a higher education can be a pathway out of poverty. Twenty years ago, she related to the Reilly Lecture audience, she herself was a poor mother, suffering abuse from a violent husband. Eventually separated, she enrolled in a community college, supported by the pre-1996 federal welfare system called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. She graduated, enrolled in graduate school, got her Ph.D. and now teaches for a living. Her daughter is a student at Smith College.

I would characterize Vivyan Adair's story as a case of pure pluck and luck - something that happens to one person in a million - if it weren't for Adair's ACCESS Project. ACCESS has made a college education accessible to many other adults who have used their education to become productive wage earners, not to mention taxpayers.

The program, Adair explained further, is particularly critical in the wake of the federal government's retooling of welfare in 1996. That legislation replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the basic federal welfare program now in place. Supporters of welfare reform hailed TANF as the "end of welfare as we know it," but according to Adair, TANF has been a disaster for low-income parents trying to improve their lives through education.

That's because the revised welfare laws require recipients to hold jobs after becoming social service clients. Getting off the dole and into the workforce may sound like a good idea, but in practice it forces people into dead-end jobs that only perpetuate poverty.

ACCESS, Adair explained, has broken that cycle for so many people who just needed a break, a real new deal. If you're interested in checking out the stories of some of these people, visit the ACCESS website at Hamilton college; the address is: my.hamilton.edu/college/access/index.h tml.

I've attended lots of Alfred University Reilly Lectures over the years; Adair's was by far the most compelling. And wrenching. The stories ACCESS students have to tell bring tears to your eyes. The fact that their lives now are improving make you want to stand up and cheer. For them. And for Adair's work.

I have some more good news to report. The mother of young Ajax would have been a perfect candidate for ACCESS, but she happens to be a student at Alfred, where a loose collection of friendly professors have been encouraging her to complete her undergraduate education.

It's hard work. Occasionally, you'll see one of her professors holding Ajax because child care has fallen through, or some other glitch has cropped up. But no one seems to mind, because the mother is worth the effort.

And Ajax really is a cute baby.