The same holds for students, I suspect; if the course you need to graduate is going to be taught by an adjunct with few ties to the institution — quite possibly the same adjunct, in fact — no matter whether you take it at the local state university, the local community college, or the local branch of a bricks-and-mortar for-profit, there’s very little incentive not to take it online. Mind you, I don’t think that’s the best way to get an education, but if traditional universities want to compete, they’re going to have to offer coherent core curricula taught by people who are paid not only to teach the courses, but also to talk to each other about the university’s students and their needs, and to shape and regularly revise the curriculum accordingly.

So whatever form the banding together takes, it’s going to have to include agitating for conversion of adjunct and no-service non-TT lines to more traditional jobs. And the people who can do the agitating most (which is not to say very) effectively are the tenured faculty. The pattern I’ve seen over the last few decades is that tenure-line faculty have been willing to trade lower, mostly upper-level undergrad and graduate teaching loads for increased use of non-TT faculty in the core curriculum. That pattern is going to have to reverse for non-TT faculty to see the devil’s bargain for what it is.