At this point, it is hard to gauge how many will turn out for events like these—some organizers are tight-lipped about their intentions because they don’t want to be thwarted in advance. But if Campus Safety magazine’s recent article “13 Steps Your Campus Should Take to Prepare for National Adjunct Faculty Walkout Day” is any indication, there is some concern about the disruptiveness of the protests.

According to Yoshioka, an insistence on anonymity by many of the Walkout Day organizers—who protect their identities for fear of losing their jobs—further frustrates their ability to plan meaningful action. Yoshioka has been working to convince faculty that remaining anonymous is harmful to the cause, but it’s a tough sell. “Paranoia runs rampant,” he said.

National Adjunct Walkout Day was conceived by a professor at San Jose State University who chooses to remain anonymous. She galvanizes support for it from behind a social-media veil, and she’s not the only one who hesitates to attach her name to the movement. For example, two out of three of the filmmakers behind “Freeway Fliers,” a documentary currently in production about the plight of adjunct professors, are also anonymous. On the film’s website, vague bios of “Professor X” and “Professor Y” are accompanied by generic black outlines instead of headshots.

Adjunct professors' troubling working conditions—some qualify for food stamps, and most don't get health-insurance benefits—have led some to label them “the hypereducated poor." In response to their treatment, adjunct professors on a growing number of campuses have voted to unionize.

Colman McCarthy, an adjunct professor and former Washington Post columnist wrote an op-ed last year laying out the financial prospects of part-time professors, who, he wrote, “slog like migrant workers from campus to campus.” McCarthy estimated that teaching eight courses per year—four in the fall and four in the spring—at a median wage would earn an adjunct $21,600. “Across the hall,” he wrote, “a tenured professor could make $100,000 for teaching half as many courses to half as many students.”

Robert Yoshioka would like to see tenure phased out entirely to make way for a more egalitarian system. “They should be on renewable long-term contracts like everyone else in every other industry,” he said. “And they should be evaluated accordingly.”

The percentage of academics who work part-time has grown in recent decades. A 2009 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that 75.5 percent of instructors at institutions granting two- or four-year degrees held contingent jobs and/or were not on the track to tenure. According to a recent article in Elle, the reverse was true 20 or 30 years ago, when 75 percent of professors held tenured or tenure-track positions. In the past, adjunct professorship could be thought of as the way dues were paid before attaining tenure, but these days many adjuncts who have worked for years or even decades cannot realistically expect to attain full-time professorship.