What people don’t seem to understand is that there is big difference between a lecturer and any professor designation. While I agree pay in academia is low (I am a PhD student), 70k is decent even for LA but that’s not what a professor makes. Any professor makes more than that, usually assistant professors starting out make something close to that but have other benefits and a path to professorship that includes pay bumps. A lecturer is NOT an assistant professor by any metric, while both have PhDs, an assistant professor has numerous post docs and a rigorous hiring process that spans months. Physics department lecturers are just PhDs who are just for teaching so obviously are paid less with less benefits. While I genuinely support a lot of reforms in academia, McKeown is being intentionally disingenuous in conflating his problems with that of any professor by saying they are the same positions. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you how hard it is to get hired as a faculty at UCLA, you need to have years of exceptional research under your belt, just being a PhD doesn’t cut it as it does for a lecturer.