I really wanted to agree with this article about contingent faculty from AHA Perspectives by Andrew Bell. He diagnoses the problem right:
On many campuses, contingent faculty and adjuncts are treated like part-time retail workers. A survey conducted by the AHA in 2000 shed light on some of the problems they face: outdated equipment, job insecurity, lack of support for research trips and conferences, and limited prospects for career advancement. Of course, the same survey also indicated that not all of these workers are unhappy; some reported a high level of job satisfaction. But evidence from subsequent surveys suggests that most of these contented instructors were able to overlook the less pleasant aspects of part-time pedagogy because they derived the bulk of their income from sources outside the academy. School administrators seem either unable or unwilling to differentiate between adjuncts who depend on per-class stipends for survival and those who view their paychecks as icing on the cake.
The result of this indifference, whether willful or not, has been the steady growth of a largely invisible underclass of struggling instructors whose concerns are rarely addressed by the academy.
That’s horrible, but to me the AHA’s solution misses the mark:
So what can be done to improve the quality of life for adjuncts and contingent faculty? In 2003, the AHA and the Organization of American Historians issued a joint resolution which listed a clear set of guidelines for departments to follow. First, the resolution recommends that part-time and temporary teachers be eligible for raises and promotions after a clearly defined probationary period. Second, it acknowledges that part-timers and temporary workers deserve access to the same benefits their tenured colleagues enjoy such as health care, parking spaces, photocopying services, and research grants. Third, the OAH and the AHA strongly feel that administrators should limit the number of adjuncts and contingent faculty (including graduate students) they hire to teach courses. The guidelines state that part-time teachers should make up no more than 40 percent of the instructors at community colleges, 30 percent at research institutions, and 20 percent at four-year colleges.
Am I missing something here? My department doesn’t control the size of its budget. That’s the norm, right? The problem is with administrators who think they can make up for budget shortfalls off teh backs of their faculty. Even the third part of this program uses the word “administrators” in a way that makes me think the AHA means department chairmen because the deans I know play no role in actually hiring faculty.
Besides, go to hard-pressed dean for better adjunct salary and benefits and they’ll probably plead poverty. In Colorado, the deans at state schools at least would be right. The key to solving the adjunct labor crisis lies in convincing administrators above the level of department chair that paying adjunct faculty a pittance is really cutting off your nose to spite your face for the reasons that Bell outlines in the article: Bad job conditions hurt teaching and therefore make students unhappy. Unhappy students hurts revenue in the long run.
Is there really a history department chair anywhere in the country who’d disagree with that assessment?
More or Less Bunk 
The fix to over reliance on adjunct faculty lies with the faculty. Over the past 60 years they have slowly ceded their role in setting educational policy to non-academic administrators.
So instead of the administration being the servant of the educators and providing the services of keeping the plant running, the faculty is now just treated as a group of highly pampered employees with only a nominal role in running the institution.
Another route (equally unlikely to happen) would be to change the rules that the accreditation groups use to rate a school. Once again, it is educators who make the visits and rate what they see, but they follow other’s guidelines.
HIgher Ed is now a big business and faculty is just part of the cost structure, not the primary focus. Perhaps the real turning point happened when football coaches started to earn more than college presidents.
I agree with most of what Robert says above. Another tactic to controlling the use of adjunct faculty is to educate parents about the practice and to get them to care. I would like to hear mom ask the college recruiting officer: “But if I send my little precious to your university, how many of the courses are taught by adjuncts and how many by tenure-track faculty?”
Critics like Bell abound, but, in the end, historians are service workers like anyone else. As many historians see themselves as advocates for justice and fairness, or, at least, many do not subscribe entirely to rank elitism and celebrate their superiority to their less-educated fellow citizens, the question becomes why should historians assume they deserve working conditions better than those of a supermarket check out clerk or other hourly wage worker?