Adjunct is a way of designating an affiliation that is not on the tenure track, i.e. is not regular faculty (and will not be). In my experience it's a professi

Adjunct is a way of designating an affiliation that is not on the tenure track, i.e. is not regular faculty (and will not be). In my experience it's a professional affiliation that is flexible, designating that you are not a student, but not regular faculty. In some cases it designates a sessional lecturer (i.e. paid by the course, not full time, no job security), but it can also be used to associate someone in the department for the purposes of contributing to research or co-supervising a student. So you can end up being an adjunct for a department for a while without ever having been employed by them directly. Originally it was much more the latter use, and not the former, but as the use of non-TT instructors grew some places used adjunct for this, others "lecturer", "sessional" etc.