I am "junior faculty." My 100-level classes are capped at twenty students. I get no benefits -- unless you count a faculty parking sticker. I even pay for my own photocopying. I make the princely sum of $2,100/course/semester. Basically, for a fall/spring combo, I make $12,600.00 -- perhaps more, if I pick up a couple of the summer sessions that the tenured profs will not deign to teach, or pick up a night course for the adult continuing ed department. No TA for me -- Hell, no OFFICE for me. More often than not, I am treated as the TA for the upper levels.
By comparison, my tenured department "betters" teach one or two upper-level courses a semester, make $65K a year (with full bennies), and have their travel to various bullsh*t conferences subsidized, so that they can deliver obscure papers on the minutia of their specialty.
I am also a non-tenured adjunct at an East Coast two-year college. I teach Speech Communications. I am more fortunate than you are, though. I have a few requirements, but other than that, have a lot of freedom. I am also a pro-life, Republican, but I don’t advertise that. My students are liberal. I listened to a group of speeches last night that broke my heart, but I try hard to be fair. I listen to the reasoning and not the topic and try to teach them to think and reason out arguments. I teach at a community college and fortunately, am paid decently, if not spectacularly. You make what the adjuncts make at my husband’s college. My husband is tenured, gets “bennies” and works widely hard.
I do realize that some 100/200 level courses are going to be smaller. I went to a major university where there would be 100 plus people in an auditoroum. To me that was a racket. The upper level classes where the class sizes come in at 20 students are a different matter. In this case the university was billing $2.5K for the class which earned them only $50K for the 3 hours per week we were in the class for the semester.
The instructor costs are not the problem though.