"Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because they can’t."

They could pay adjuncts more money if they had to, but why would they if they didn't have to? That's not how supply and demand works!

> Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare => no improvement in the adjunct situation.

#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences.

> How do you even go about doing #2?

Reduce or eliminate federal student loans for graduate degrees in non-essential subjects.

#2 already does itself, in a sense; I made the perfectly reasonable life decision to become a software engineer instead of a philosopher because philosophy isn't a very promising career. I know another philosopher who even went to grad school before ending up making the same decision.

You might ask, well why don't all the adjuncts just learn to do something useful for a living instead of being adjuncts? The reason is, if you major in a purely academic major (I'm going to pick on philosophy because that was my major but there are many others), you can easily get into a bubble where the only people in your field are academics, and you start to think that your only option is to become an academic yourself. Professors will actually encourage you to go to grad school. You will go to grad school, get your Ph.D., and still have this mistaken impression that becoming a philosopher is a reasonable career decision because you've spent your entire adult life working towards that goal. But the only work you can get in that career is as an adjunct. You spend more and more years with the mistaken impression that you can get a tenure track position, somehow, somewhere, until you're in your 30's or 40's and have no useful professional skills. If you don't figure out in undergrad that the world isn't especially willing to pay for more philosophers, you get stuck in a career trap of trying to become a philosopher. You end up being the academic equivalent of a minor league baseball player or an aspiring actor who's scraping by with nothing or waiting tables in Los Angeles--someone who thought they could make it big but it never happened. The difference being, if you're a major league baseball player or a Hollywood actor, you make millions of dollars. If you're a tenured professor in philosophy, you make a middle-class income in whatever town happens to have the state university that happened to hire you.

> So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and health care coverage?

Unionization only works when the union has monopoly power over the source of labor. Adjuncts are easily replaceable--that's why they already get paid shit. Unions only work when there's a barrier to entry. If one doesn't naturally exist, what happens is that the union itself becomes the barrier to entry.

If you're going to erect barriers to entry then the best option is to just limit the use of adjunct faculty in the first place and open more tenure-track positions to replace them.

> Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead.

It's not like the money is just going to magically go to the faculty, and if it did, it would go to the tenured faculty, not the adjuncts.