Hiring freeze raises staffing concerns for Pitt language departments  

As preparation begins for the 2025-26 academic year, Pitt’s language departments face uncertainty amid the hiring freeze.

At Pitt’s most recent faculty assembly, former University Senate President Chris Bonneau  voiced concern over how the hiring freeze could worsen staffing issues in “already struggling departments,” specifically in the language departments.

On March 10, University leaders announced a full faculty and staff hiring freeze through the end of the fiscal year in June. This decision comes as universities across the country institute hiring freezes as a response to uncertainty surrounding federal funding. 

Elizabeth Oyler, associate professor and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, said staffing is an ongoing issue in the department, “as it is with all departments that would like to grow.”

“We’re all still trying to recover from the pause in growth we experienced during the COVID years, and in some cases, from earlier,” Oyler said. “Staffing concerns are especially acute for small departments like ours, where being short just one faculty member represents a more significant loss in class offerings percentage-wise than it does for a bigger department.”  

Oyer said EALL relies on visiting faculty and part-time instructors for some of their core courses. When the hiring freeze was announced, the department was in the process of trying to fill those positions for next year.

“We’ve been lucky to have the dean’s support to convert some of our part-time positions to full-time ones, but we still have holes in our coverage dating back to COVID-era losses that need to be filled,” Oyler said. “We can’t cover fundamental courses without the positions for which we are trying to hire now.” 

According to Oyler, the department needs part-time instructors in particular “to help with the ebb and flow of student numbers,” with student enrollments being unpredictable from year to year. 

“If we have to cut sections of a class because we don’t hire part-time personnel to cover them, there’s a ripple effect for students — if a student can’t take first-year Japanese at the beginning of their time here at Pitt, for example, they’re less likely to be able to take enough Japanese language classes to major or minor in Japanese,” Oyler said. “But more importantly, we’re not offering them what we promised when they accepted at Pitt.”

Oyler said the effect of the hiring freeze on the fall 2025 semester “remains to be seen,” since there may be exceptions to the hiring freeze to address demonstrated needs. 

“I am hopeful that the provost and chancellor will be able to see how devastating even one cut can be for a small department and do what they can to assure that we can weather this difficult and unpredictable time as a university with strong programs across all its schools,” Oyler said. 

The French and Italian departments are small, with tenure-stream faculty, appointment-stream faculty and part-time instructors. The department has both undergraduate and graduate programs for students. Associate professor and department Chair John Walsh said the Italian master’s program was caught between the pause in graduate admissions and the hiring freeze.

The department’s request to undo the graduate admission freeze for the program was denied, according to Walsh.

“The graduate students in both programs typically teach the beginning to intermediate sequence of courses, as well as some mid- to upper-level courses,” Walsh said. “This year, all of the current Italian MA students are graduating. This is unusual in that we typically have two MAs per year, but it’s essentially a result of the pandemic, when admissions were also on hold temporarily.”

Between the lack of Italian graduate students and the hiring freeze, Walsh said they were told to cover any vacant positions with faculty overloads or part-time instructors.

“Because of leaves for some current faculty next academic year, some 15 sections of Italian courses could go unstaffed,” Walsh said. “The lack of Italian graduate students next year will also impact graduate seminars that enroll grads in French, Slavic, and other students in the Dietrich School.”

Other concerns, Walsh said, include the process for reviewing requests for exemption for both graduate admissions and hiring and adding to the workload of current faculty.

Claude Mauk, director of the Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center, said the extent of limits on spending is more of a concern for the center. 

While there are always budgetary limitations, Mauk said they work with different partners on campus who can help them financially, like the University Center for International Studies. Certain high-level language classes are funded by UCIS through grants from the federal Department of Education.

“If those grant funds are not available, then we will be in a position where we may not be able to offer those classes,” Mauk said. “We are currently considering options for restructuring how we approach advanced language instruction within our programs that may result in reduced costs without reducing the levels of instruction we offer or reducing the quality of our classes. I have a great deal of confidence in the center’s faculty’s creativity and commitment.”