By Audrey Williams June

The rationale behind the American Association of University Professors' recent report urging colleges to convert adjunct faculty members to the tenure track is simple: The faculty is falling apart. The time to do something about it is now.

It's a clarion call that scholarly associations, unions, lawmakers, and even some administrators have sounded for years, all the while pushing in various ways to reverse a trend that threatens to turn the professoriate into an oasis of faculty members with tenure surrounded by adjuncts with poor pay, no academic freedom, and no job security.

Although some part-time and full-time adjuncts have managed to gain better working conditions and benefits, tenure and its protections have been elusive. While some institutions have shifted some of their contingent faculty members, nearly always full-timers, to the tenure track, that's rare. And so even as the association works to fine-tune its case for "stabilizing the faculty," its toughest task will be getting colleges to actually do what it takes to make that happen.

What's the holdup? It's nothing new. Administrators and tenured faculty members, in particular, lack a strong enough incentive to embrace such conversions, which would fundamentally alter the academic workplace, observers say. Colleges would have to give up their much-touted ability to respond to the ebbs and flows of enrollment and operating budgets by hiring faculty members who are low cost and easy to let go. And tenured professors, in many instances, don't see a clear link between their status in the academy and the fortunes of those off the tenure track.

No Quick Turnaround Foreseen

"I think a change like this, some institutions will nibble around the edges of it," says Paul D. Umbach, an associate professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, whose research includes the effects of non-tenure-track faculty members on higher education. "That doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to do something like this, but you just have to wonder how quickly something like this would happen and how widespread it would be."

For administrators, non-tenure-track faculty members equal flexibility, a term that means that colleges can cut costs in these strained economic times by nixing the jobs of those who work outside the tenure stream. It's difficult to envision a scenario in which institutions would willingly give up that arrow in their quivers.

"Rightly or wrongly, if there is a significant downturn, those faculty can be dismissed," says William G. Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California. "Tenure is a long-term financial commitment for an institution, and at this point in time, I just don't see institutions making a long-term commitment like that."

Still, faculty members who work outside the tenure track are in "the most tenuous situation in all of academe," Mr. Umbach says, and that state of affairs is behind the AAUP's recent push for extending tenure to more faculty members.

But tenured professors are themselves in a precarious position. In its report, "Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track (2009)," the association notes the steadily shrinking pool of professors with tenure, saying they can't possibly protect academic freedom for themselves, much less for faculty members not on the tenure track. Yet that threat doesn't appear to have translated into widespread support of contingent faculty members by tenured professors, especially on the prospect of conversion. In fact, many professors and administrators at research-intensive institutions see tenure as "a status marker, the privilege of researchers and not of teaching faculty," the association's report says.

An Appeal to Self-Interest

To be sure, some tenured professors have taken a stand for faculty members who work at will, although conversions resembling what the AAUP has proposed have not typically been on the table. Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of moral theology and ethics at Marquette University, is one of those professors. Last year he urged his colleagues in the theology department to lead the way in working to gain better treatment for non-tenure-track faculty members at the university. After all, Mr. Maguire contended, Marquette had a moral obligation as a Jesuit institution to do right by all of its workers.

So in April 2008, Marquette's theology department unanimously passed a resolution urging the college to provide health benefits to the Ph.D. students who had graduated from its program and were teaching part time at Marquette until they could find full-time work elsewhere. It was a small step that "didn't go anywhere" with the administration, Mr. Maguire says, and interest in adjunct justice in the theology department "has softened."

Says Mr. Maguire: "I like to say we've divided the academy into the royals and the slaves. The royals are the tenured faculty who have the wonderful schedules—thanks to the adjuncts—and the good salaries and health benefits."

Some faculty members have questioned Mr. Maguire's unwavering commitment to contingent faculty issues, he says, referring to it as "causing a ruckus." But he has noticed that, with the alarm over the continuous erosion of tenure, more professors support his view. In fact, Marquette's Academic Senate is conducting a study to get more detail on how much academic departments depend on adjuncts as instructors and how those faculty members are treated, among other things.

"Some of their motives are altruistic, but for some of them, it is self-interest," says Mr. Maguire of colleagues who have joined him in speaking out. "Nothing is so powerful as self-interest, and there's a lot of that in the faculty."

Though the report says that the tipping point for the professoriate is here, the move toward conversion still looks like a long upward struggle. But at the very least, all the discussion of "What if?" and "Why?" and "How?" will lay important groundwork.

"It's an admirable attempt," says Southern California's Mr. Tierney. "Reinvigorating the conversation about the importance of tenure is always useful at all types of campuses."