Janice McMannis, beloved and influential academic advisor for Pitt’s sports teams for 20 years in the 1990s and early 2000s, died December 9, 2025, at 78.
“Jan gave her all to the students she worked with, wanting the very best for them and working very tirelessly to support them,” said Mike Farabaugh, director of Academic Support Services. “Her work with individual students and the teams she worked with, specifically football and gymnastics, had profound impacts on their lives after they graduated. I’ve heard from many former student-athletes that they remember life lessons of integrity and the value of education in their lives from Jan. The writing lab in the Willis Center for Academic Support Services for Student-Athletes was dedicated in her name when she retired, and her plaque in the center reminds us of her integrity and commitment to service.”
“Anytime you talked to one of the players, Jan’s name came up,” remembered Chris LaSala, associate athletic director of football administration, who came to Pitt from Boston College in 1997. “Every person: ‘Jan got after me. Jan made sure I got it right. Jan took care of me.’ It was all different forms of love and support.”
McMannis, he said, became a resource for more than academic tutoring for some of her students: “When you’re young and you’re in a new place, you’re searching for people you can trust,” said LaSala of Pitt athletes. “Once you gain the trust of a young person, then they’re going to go to you for everything. And that’s what she was. She could deal with anybody.
“Some of the kids she worked with weren’t completely ready for college,” he added. And if you are a player who becomes prominent, “a lot of people let you get away with stuff and treat you different.” Not McMannis, he said.
“She had a unique talent to be flexible and rigid at the same time,” he said. “Everybody learns different and she was a teacher at heart: ‘You’re going to be good.’ She was going to get you to learn. Some kids might not even realize they were getting there. That was her talent. There was no excuse she hadn’t heard; she called their bluff and got them in there and got them working. That made these kids better adults, without them even realizing it.”
McMannis hired Robin Clarke as a writing tutor in 1998, and Clarke later joined Pitt’s English department as a faculty member. “She was the hardest working person you could imagine,” Clarke said, recalling the long hours McMannis put in. “She would be the last one there. She was just unbelievably dedicated.
“She was very, very smart and she loved analysis. Film was her first love.” Sometimes her students would choose a film course, thinking it might be easier than a literature course, and find that film theory was even more difficult to master, Clarke recalled: “It was always about them developing literacy — film literacy or writing literacy. It wasn’t about just getting them a passable grade. She was a force pushing against that. It was a real boost to their self-esteem.”
McMannis had a movie poster next to the table where she and all the tutors worked with students. It was a poster for “Aliens,” showing Sigourney Weaver holding a child in one arm and a giant weapon in the other. To Clarke, this represented McMannis’ “toughness: ‘I’m not going to let you fail.’ To be a tutor with her, she just lifted people up. She made sure you were doing your best... and it really shaped me and other tutors. She inspired people to be better than they knew they could be, whether it was the tutors or the students. She turned it into a place of really dynamic activity.”
Clarke showed photos of pages from the retirement book presented to McMannis by students and colleagues. “I really don’t know if you actually realize the significant role that you have played in the lives of so many students,” one Pitt athlete wrote. “To me, you were my home away from home; you provided a tender touch of care and concern that went far beyond your call of duty.” Others wrote: “Without you, where would I be?” and “I wouldn’t be where I am today without your guidance.”
One of those students was Penny Semaia, a football player (1999-2003) and then a senior associate athletic director for student life here, working beside McMannis; today he is vice president of stadium relations for the Buffalo Bills.
“She was one of the best academic mentors I’ve had in my collegiate career,” Semaia said. “Many of us, coming into the University, we may not have had the right academic background. She cared for us in ways some of us may never have experienced in life. She cared for us in a way that challenged us.”
He recalls her not only helping him during his final Pitt course, on African dance, but also her attending the class’s final performance and joining students on stage to dance herself.
“I’ve become a public speaker,” he said. “I’m also published now. If it wasn’t for the love and care of Jan and Jan bringing in great tutors like Robin …”
McMannis’ film work — including supporting the films of her husband, local documentarian Tony Buba — also involved joining history faculty member Marcus Rediker’s team filming “Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels” — a Pitt-sponsored film that searches in Sierra Leone for local memories of the seizure of the slave schooner Amistad there in 1839, and for lost ruins of the country’s slave-trading site.
Rediker first got to know McMannis when he was helping with basketball recruiting here. “I got to know her as a really committed academic advisor to students,” he said. “Jan was a person of extreme honesty — especially if she thought somebody was not living up to expectations. She just gave heart and soul to the University of Pittsburgh.”
For “Ghosts of Amistad,” she played a crucial role “for the conceptualization of it and the actual travel arrangements,” Rediker said. “Jan was such an important part of that trip. She had very sharp observations to make about what we were doing and how we should do it,” particularly about the ethical behavior needed among his team, who were coming in from the outside — from a rich country. She also had a crucial role in the film’s editing. “I just think of her as a very intelligent and compassionate commentator on what we encountered in life.
“Especially women and children, as we entered the villages, these people had never seen an older white woman. She handled the situation with such grace and such warmth that everybody loved her. She was a great ambassador for the University.”
Janice McMannis was born on June 29, 1947, in Los Angeles, and grew up in Arcadia, Calif. She earned a master’s degree in English from Western Washington University and a reading specialist certificate from Pitt. In addition to her University career, she worked as an editorial consultant for Wide Angle Magazine and film programmer at Pittsburgh Filmmakers
She also worked with students in prisons, on tribal lands and in public libraries, and was very active in the Braddock community, where she was president of the board of directors of the successor library to Braddock’s Carnegie Library. She also worked on campaigns to try to save Braddock Hospital and organized with North Braddock Residents for our Future against local fracking.
In addition to her husband Tony Buba, she is survived by her sister Marilyn (Evans) Kohler, brother-in-law Stephen Kohler, nephew Nathan Kohler and his wife Heather Kohler.
— Marty Levine