Faculty Searches in Limbo As Freeze Interrupts Hiring Processes Across Harvard

Harvard’s imposition of a hiring freeze on Monday morning interrupted faculty hiring processes across the University, leaving professors scrambling to figure out how to fill vacancies — and how to keep their departments’ work running if they can’t.

The freeze — which Harvard attributed to “financial uncertainties” under President Donald Trump — comes just as some departments look to finish their monthslong faculty hiring processes, which typically conclude by early March.

Department heads did not receive advance notice of the freeze, according to Philosophy professor and chair Bernhard Nickel. Instead, they learned of it when everyone else did — through a Monday morning announcement from President Alan M. Garber ’76 to faculty and staff across the University.

The hiring halt has left some programs, including the Classics and Philosophy departments, with unfilled faculty and staff vacancies. Some departments are now searching for ways to fill empty seats or to run courses they were depending on new hires to teach.

History professor Derek J. Penslar, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies, said the freeze has left two ongoing searches for Jewish studies professors and several visiting appointments in limbo. The pause comes at a particularly challenging time for the center because many of its key faculty positions are or will soon be vacant for unrelated reasons, Penslar added.

To make up for the unfilled positions, the center is arranging for several visiting professors to join and “provide essential temporary coverage,” Penslar wrote.

“I am deeply concerned about the freeze,” he added.

Classics professor Richard F. Thomas said the hiring pause has halted several searches for lecturers in his department in their early stages. Now, he said, the department is “not sure how to fill” the seats — and he and his colleagues may now have to teach additional courses to fill the gaps.

“It will mean some of us will have to step up and do extra,” he added. “But that’s okay.”

Harvard's Philosophy department is located in Emerson Hall. By Pavan V. Thakkar

Nickel, the Philosophy chair whose department has been forced to halt a search, said a prolonged freeze could shrink the department’s ranks as professors go on sabbatical, retire, or move on to new institutions. He added that a diminished faculty could jeopardize small or non-departmental classes such as General Education courses or first-year seminars, as professors’ bandwidth becomes limited and faculty are forced to cover more departmental classes.

“It might not make sense for us to teach as many small courses, because we just don’t have the faculty bandwidth to do so,” Nickel said.

History professor Alison Frank Johnson, who chairs the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, said the freeze’s mid-semester timing means that for some departments, just a matter of days determined their ability to recruit new hires.

“It creates a huge difference between the departments that were able to make an offer last week and the departments that were going to make an offer next week,” Johnson said. “That’s a pretty tough way of deciding which positions get filled and which disappear.”

The University’s Monday message emphasized that the pause was “temporary.” But the message gave no end date for the freeze — and several professors said the severity of its effects would depend on how long it stays in place.

Harvard School of Public Health professor John Quackenbush, who chairs the Biostatistics department, said a protracted freeze could make Harvard lose out on hiring “the leaders of tomorrow” for faculty positions.

“If it’s a month or two, maybe we can still capture outstanding candidates,” Quackenbush said. “If it’s longer, it’s a body blow to the entire system.”

The last time the University instituted a hiring pause was in April 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Harvard froze salaries and hiring University-wide as the pandemic reduced revenue sources and increased costs dramatically.

Frank Johnson drew parallels between the 2020 and 2025 freezes, saying the timing of both “is almost exactly the same.” In 2020, some departments were likewise in the middle of their hiring processes or nearing their final stages.

But Frank Johnson said she saw the current freeze as “a crisis of human making.”

The freeze follows similar moves at schools including Stanford University and MIT and comes as the Trump administration began issuing increasingly targeted threats to universities this week after months of attempted funding cuts and saber-rattling.

“I saw it coming sooner or later,” Math lecturer Puskar Mondal wrote in an emailed statement. But he added that he thought administrators were “shaken” by Trump’s announcement of $400 million in cuts to federal funding at Columbia University.

Most faculty who spoke to The Crimson said they understood why Harvard would freeze hiring to shore up its finances. But some said they hoped Harvard would be more offensive in responding to Trump’s escalating attacks on federal funding for higher education.

Government professor Ryan D. Enos said that while “we all understand” that the University had to address short-term budgetary concerns, Trump’s cuts at Columbia show that the University can’t placate its way out of the criticism coming from Washington.

“Harvard has to understand, both for its own good and for the good of higher education and more largely civil society, that it has to stand up and push back,” Enos said.

“Keeping their head down is not a viable option for survival,” he added.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.