"I awoke in a shelter for battered women," she says. "I had four missing teeth, a broken clavicle and bruised ribs. In the small cot next to me lay my eight-month-old daughter, Heather, still traumatized by the brutalization we had suffered at the hands of her own father. With scant education and family support, few resources and no job, I had little reason for hope."
However, a month later she received reason for hope from
North Seattle Community College (NSCC) in Washington, where she enrolled with considerable trepidation.
"I was nervous, I was 32 years old, I was afraid to speak because I was afraid people would see I was missing teeth," Adair says.
She also feared that her classmates would learn that she and her daughter were living in a car parked near campus. A kind NSCC janitor let them use the culinary students’ shower room.
Adair overcame these obstacles and thrived at NSCC.
"My teachers began to convince me that I was a valuable and capable thinker," Adair says. "I found that I actually enjoyed the challenge of thinking critically, creatively and analytically."
English instructor Marilyn Smith was particularly influential as a mentor.
"When I teach my classes, and when I’ve won awards, it’s because the teaching I do is an effort to model the teachers I had at NSCC," Adair says. "So I think about Marilyn always, in the way she reached out to students and engaged them in such an intense level in every class."
More than for most students, community college altered Adair’s life.
"I often feel I was reborn at North Seattle Community College. I came alive," she says. "But it also became my family—a family in a literal sense because I was living here and spending all my time here. A family in the sense that my teachers were creating a new person."
After graduating from NSCC, Adair earned a baccalaureate, master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Washington. She joined the faculty of Hamilton College (New York), where today she is an associate professor of women’s studies, specializing in studying representations of women on welfare and how they are impacted by welfare reform, education and public policy.
Along with her teaching and research, Adair has launched initiatives aimed at helping people whose circumstances resemble her past ones. In 2000 she founded the ACCESS Project at Hamilton College, an educational, social service and career demonstration program that helps low-income parents move from welfare and low-wage jobs to meaningful employment and higher education.
"ACCESS students learn to make connections between their own known knowledge of the world and the theories, analysis and history of others," Adair says.
To date, the ACCESS Project has helped more than 140 low-income New York State parents earn college degrees.
Adair also curates and delivers lectures in connection with the traveling exhibit "The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poverty and the Promise of Higher Education." The exhibit—which is free for display to colleges, universities and nonprofits—consists of 50 framed, museum-quality photos and narratives of poor parents who have changed their lives through higher education.
The exhibit’s mission, according to Adair, is "to assure a crucial plurality and diversity of perspectives and representations of our shared world."
Adair’s achievements as a scholar and advocate have garnered numerous honors, including Hamilton College’s John L. Hatch Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2006, she was named CASE/Carnegie New York State Professor of the Year, the first women’s studies professor in the nation so honored.