Recently, the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry posted a job listing for an adjunct position teaching classes. Recruiting short-term faculty to teach classes a la carte with no hope of tenure is now routine at universities. But this particular job listing attracted opprobrium, first on academic Twitter and then in Inside Higher Ed, the New York Times, and other periodicals, because it specified the position would be “without salary” and offer “no compensation.”

The most straightforward and the most popular interpretation is that such positions are an extension of adjunct faculty generally being paid less than one would expect given their level of education. At the University of California, full-time lecturers make the same salary as tenure-track faculty. What that conceals, though, is that a) most lecturers are not full-time and b) most tenure-track faculty are “off scale,” meaning that tenure-track faculty make more, sometimes much more, than the university minimum. The University of California lecturers’ union reports that part-time faculty make a median of just under $20,000 at the UC, though in most cases, this is not their only source of income, with additional income from teaching at other schools (often on the other side of town) or from a noneducational line of work.