"In my wildest dreams, I would never think I would be a Ph.D. on welfare," said Evans-Brewer, 48, who previously taught for 17 years in public schools.
Evans-Brewer qualified for $390 a month in food stamps for her and her three children, a $40-a-month Medicaid family plan and subsidized day care for her 4-year-old daughter. The Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California at Berkeley estimates that about 25 percent of part-time faculty rely on such public assistance programs.
She is among an estimated 8,000 part-time professors in the Chicago area the Fight for $15 campaign is rallying to its cause amid efforts to unionize them. The campaign is pushing for adjuncts like Evans-Brewer to be paid $15,000 a course, including benefits, a more than fivefold increase from the $2,700 a course she currently receives without benefits.
"Adjunct professors are becoming a bigger part of the movement against income inequality," said Tom Balanoff, president of the Service Employees International Union Illinois State Council. Since 2013, the SEIU has organized adjuncts at more than two dozen schools around the country.
Some full-time professors also are supporting the demonstrations.
On Wednesday 52-year-old Scott Grunow was among hundreds of people carrying signs, chanting slogans and banging on plastic drums as part of the Fight for 15 rally on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois.
Most of the demonstrators were fast-food workers, but Grunow is a nontenured full-time professor at UIC and is also pushing for a pay increase. A member of a faculty union, Grunow declined to say how much he is paid. But he noted that the base pay for professors like him is $37,500 and that if the Fight for 15's push to pay $15,000 per class became a reality he would be able to quit a second 15-hour-a-week job as a social media manager for a website, continue his education and conduct research.
"I would be closer to the supposed American Dream," he said. Grunow, who has a master's degree, has taught at UIC for 10 years and previously taught at a community college. He said UIC professors like himself work on year-to-year contracts.
"We are supposed to be developing minds," he said. But he said professors carry such heavy teaching loads that students do not get the attention they deserve.
"We can't be here as much as we want to," he said.
Grunow said he usually teaches seven classes a year; he teaches English and religious studies.
Last year, Evans-Brewer taught 10 classes at Concordia, and said each required about 10 hours a week in preparation, teaching, talking with students and grading. She is paid at the end of the semester, which she said leaves her for long stretches without money coming in.
Evans-Brewer said she has applied for nonteaching jobs but has found potential employers that include coffee shops don't call her back. She suspects it's because of the degrees on her resume, which includes the Ph.D. she received in 2012. She said she has no plans to scrub them from her resume. "Why should I remove two-thirds of my hard work and effort for them to accept me?" Evans-Brewer said.
At the same time, she seems disheartened, resigned to her fate.
"There is no way you can go up, just down and out," Evans-Brewer said.
In addition to low pay, many adjuncts are treated as fill-ins. As such they often are assigned their courses at the last moment, often classes other professors have rejected because of the subject matter or size of the class or because of a heavy toll of grading.
Students also are affected. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation said in a report last year that the last-minute hiring of part-time faculty members impedes their preparation for teaching and hurts student learning.
Adjuncts aren't guaranteed they will be assigned classes, which has become more precarious as colleges cut back on the number of classes they allow individual adjuncts to teach while relying overall on adjuncts to pick up a bigger teaching load. It's becoming more common for adjuncts to seek teaching assignments at a number of schools to bolster their incomes.
A case in point is Matt Hoffmann, who said he expected to teach at least two classes this semester at Loyola University Chicago but at the last minute was informed he could teach only one class. He scrambled to find another class and landed one at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the fall, he is scheduled to teach two classes at IIT, but he still doesn't know if Loyola will offer him a class.
Hoffmann calculates he works about 30 hours a week, which translates to a pay of about $21 per hour. For that pay he said he invested eight years completing a master's degree in environmental studies and a doctorate in sociology.
He has about $10,000 in credit card debt and receives an average of $200 to $300 a month from his parents to help him and his wife make ends meet and support their 16-month-old son.
"I'm 35 years old and still need some support from my parents," Hoffmann said. "I never considered myself a laborer or someone who would be part of a labor union because I always thought that those were for working-class people in industries that required manual labor. ... It took me a long time to realize that I was actually part of the working class."
Hoffmann, who wore a bright orange T-shirt with a "Faculty Forward" logo as he participated in a Fight for 15 rally Wednesday, said full-time workers should not be living in poverty. "I am not looking to be rich but just middle class," Hoffmann said.
Unions have long seen adjuncts as ripe for unionizing. Some unions began organizing part-time faculty in the Chicago area in the mid-1980s, winning representation at community colleges, Columbia College and Roosevelt University.
Beverly Stewart, an adjunct professor at Roosevelt, said such efforts helped boost the pay per course to about $5,000 from about $2,000 in 2001. Stewart said she hopes the SEIU-backed Fight for 15 campaign also will coax universities to offer more full-time positions.
Instead, universities increasingly are relying on part-time faculty to teach classes. The number of part-time faculty at more than 4,500 public and private schools nationwide rose to 42 percent in 2011, the most recent year available, from 25 percent in the mid-1970s, according to figures from the American Association of University Professors. Full-time professors who are not on a tenure track are also on the rise. In 2011, their numbers rose to 15.7 percent of total instruction staff, up from 10 percent in the mid-'70s.
During the same period, the number of tenured faculty fell to about 17 percent from 29 percent. Faculty on tenure track fell to 7 percent from about 16 percent.
Just ask Brendan McQuade how difficult it is to get on a tenure track. Last year, he said, he applied for upward of 50 such positions and didn't get any. In the end, McQuade said he accepted a one-year position paying him $51,000 at DePaul University with the hope his contract will be extended.
"It's hard to move up, hard to enter the highest level," McQuade said.