One of the things I keep getting asked is what's changed in the world of academia such that the whole adjunct thing is now a problem. I think there are a few answers to that. Remembering that I'm no expert on the subject; I've just been an adjunct for 15 years, here are some thoughts.
It seems to me that the adjunct problem is getting attention now because it has recently become customary for people to try to make a career of adjuncting. I'm sure people have done that before, but not in these kinds of numbers. Basically, people are trying to make careers as college professors without actually going through the process of getting hired as college professors. We assume that a professor teaches a 3/3 courseload and makes $60,000. Therefore, we should make something like that kind of money for working the 3/3 courseload as well.
Clearly, the university doesn't (at present) feel the same way. Let's be fair about this. We are trying to slide into the position under the radar. We are not applying for the tenure track. We're not going to the national convention. Many of us are not doing what is needed to get the tenure track (going to conferences, becoming officers in professional organizations, publishing, etc.).
In fact, the only thing we're doing is the job...which is the job of a tenure track professor and that's obvious to everyone, including the tenure track professors. This is complicated, of course, by the fact that in the job market the trend has been going towards more education for the job, rather than less (nurses at one time, for instance, needed only a certificate; now the bachelor's degree is an absolute necessity and a master's degree couldn't hurt). So, for people with M.A.s or...heaven forbid, life experience to suggest that they can teach a class that would have, twenty years ago, been taught by a Ph.D. goes against the trend.
But, here's the thing (s). I think one reason that we are seeing the adjunct problem come to the forefront is because the professor job market (and by this I mean all the people who are trying to get professorial jobs) has utterly dried up. The problem is this. Professors, not wanting to teach low level classes, are creating graduate programs that train people to be professors so that those people will teach those classes, but they train so many that there just ends up being a surplus of people in the professorial job market. Where does this surplus go? They become adjuncts of course. And then the university hires them instead of tenure track professors.
The result, as I see it, is a sizable group of people who have entered the adjunct market with Ph.D.s. Now, that's not necessarily better or worse than any other kind of adjunct except that a Ph.D. was going for a tenure track position, not for an adjunct position. They aren't just upset about the pay...they're also upset that they were promised a job, which all but doesn't exist anymore. They're going to be pissed and they're going to want some damn answers. This is me.
Speaking of the tenure track position going the way of the dinosaur...the result has been that more and more classes are being taught by the adjuncts. This seems obvious to you, of course, if you're an adjunct, but most people who ask, "why now?" don't really know that departments are being run by four or five full time professors and an army of part-timers. Obviously, when we see that we are the university, it's just the way of the thing that we're going to wonder why we're the worst treated of the university's employees. Our population now demands that we take action...or if you prefer, we now have critical mass.
Another thing that I think really factors into this is that, because of Obamacare, the university doesn't want any of us to be full time. Thus, we have to cut our time between universities. This creates the 'road scholar' problem, where we, essentially, work two or three universities just to make ends meet. This is an obvious catalyst for anyone who finds, suddenly, that, between parking passes, time on the road, and gas prices, their check and free time has dwindled away to nothing.
Finally, I think you have to factor the internet into this equation. It simply wouldn't have been possible for adjuncts to get together and deal with all this without a Facebook page or without mass emails. Do you have any idea how many adjuncts are on our side? Neither do I. But here's the thing: neither does the university. You march 700 people in front of them and they know...700. Either they're impressed or they aren't. But right now, we have X number of people. X could mean 20. It could mean 650. They don't know how to deal with that so it forces them to take us seriously even though we didn't have the giant picket carrying march.
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