A tenure-track faculty position entails a commitment on the part of the university to budget for that person’s salary FOR HIS OR HER ENTIRE CAREER at the university. In other words, an institution has to have solid funding to underwrite a tenurable line for the 30 or 40 years the person might stay in the job. That said, it’s not easy either to get a tenure-track job or, once you’ve landed it, to get tenure.

A full-time nontenure-track position usually involves a contract of one to three years. These jobs, usually lecturerships or instructorships, are much more poorly paid than tenurable positions, and, because the university makes no promises, they are devoid of job security. Although they provide benefits, pay is poor and respect is lacking. You can be canned for any reason, fair or unfair: the university is not required to provide a reason and need only decline to renew a contract. Often such contracts are renewed for year after year, mostly out of inertia and because such faculty are cheap to hire. These jobs have only two advantages: 1) it IS a job (though most people could do better outside of academia) and 2) you’re usually not required to publish while teaching, performing community and university service, and pulling in grant money.

A part-time nontenurable position is the lowest of the low. These are usually semester-to-semester contracts. Actually, you’re contracted to teach a specific class (or two, or three, or four). Pay is abysmal (truly: it prorates out to less than minimum wage), no health care or pension benefits attach to the job, and in most universities you don’t even get an office or a communal room to put your briefcase down between classes. These jobs have exactly no real benefit of any kind to the incumbents. Often filled by unemployed Ph.D.’s who try to cobble together five or six (or more!) sections a semester at two or three institutions to simulate a living wage, they represent the rawest kind of exploitation.

All of the above jobs are exempt. “Exempt” means they are exempt from a variety of rules, among them the one that says you can’t be fired without cause. At the Great Desert University, exempt employees are hired to accomplish a job no matter how many or how few hours it takes to do it, whereas nonexempt employees are hired to be present and staff an office for a specific number of hours per week.

Most staff positions are nonexempt. They’re just like jobs in any corporation or government agency, and similar rules and conditions govern them. In a state university, staff jobs are simply state jobs, with commensurately low pay and commensurately decent (usually) benefits packages.

Also, I have heard from professor-type people that in general, faculty hirings and staff hirings and the associated budgets are very different. (This kind of makes sense- aren’t professors supposed to bring funding with them or at least find it very quickly?) So you may both have been right. It’s good that your clients are happy to stand up for you, though.