By SUSAN JONES

 

With schools and other Pitt departments being asked to reduce costs for the second year in a row, the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences is taking a hard look at how it can streamline processes and create more efficiencies, Dean Adam Leibovich said, which may include combining some departments.

 

Overall, Leibovich said, the budget went up for 2026-27 in order to cover salary increases, but that means the non-compensation side of the budget, which normally stays flat, has to absorb the 5% reallocation that Dwayne Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor for finance and operations, announced in July.

 

In addition, the school’s research expenditures were down 14% last year, from $70 million to $60 million. While the number of grant applications has rebounded some, Leibovich said it will take some time to get back to previous funding levels, particularly with federal grant approvals being slowed down.

 

Provost Joe McCarthy said he’s been talking with deans across the University about the reallocation and how they are approaching it within their schools. 

 

“The intent of the reallocation is to support the University’s continued effort to bring expense growth into alignment with revenue growth,” he said. “Each school has a different set of circumstances, so there is not a single approach that I am suggesting. I have asked deans to look carefully at their priorities, their resources, and their academic missions as they consider where adjustments can be made. These are difficult decisions, and I recognize that they have real implications for our schools and our community. My role is to work with the deans as they navigate those decisions and to make sure we remain focused on the University’s broader academic priorities.”

The majority of most department’s budget goes to compensation, and reducing those costs is a slow process, Leibovich said. He stressed that “we don’t want and we’re not laying people off. … The way we can decrease the compensation is slower, and that is by not hiring faculty as much as we normally would to keep up with attrition, and not replacing staff as quickly or as fully as we would to keep the staffing at the same level.”

 

He said they’ve already reduced the number of part-time and visiting professors, “which means that the departments had to be selective and reduce the number of courses that they are able to cover.”

 

For the Dietrich School and the College of General Studies there are 14 fewer visiting faculty (59 to 35) this fall than last, and 12 fewer part-time (268 to 254). In addition, roughly 10 full-time faculty positions — out of around 900 — that became open through attrition were not filled for this semester.

 

There also are 23 fewer staff members in Dietrich this year — 458, down from 481 last fall.

 

Last academic year, when schools were first asked to reduce their budgets by 5%, the Dietrich School handled that by being careful with staff hiring or rehiring and looking at other efficiencies, such as reducing the number of in-person events, especially that involved food, and reducing some travel. 

 

“We did reduce the budgets of the departments, programs and centers across the school, and because of these and some other efforts, we were able to basically cover the reallocation last year,” Leibovich said.

 

“We’ve worked with our departments to make tough and sometimes painful budgetary decisions. Ultimately, after the dean’s office provides funding to departments, decisions about the specific courses each department offers and the faculty who teach those courses happens at the department level,” he said in response to news reports that the History Department will cut up to 11 elective courses from its catalog in the spring.

 

“Those deliberations are based on a variety of factors, including student demand, enrollment data and major requirements. We trust our department chairs and program directors to make the best choices to ensure that our students graduate prepared to thrive and contribute to their professions, communities and the world around them. Individual departments would be in a better position to indicate which courses they are or aren’t teaching as a result of their internal budget priorities.”

With another reallocation this year, Leibovich said the school will continue with the previous cost-cutting measures, “but we have to be a little bit more strategic in what we are doing because there’s not that much, or any, fat.”

 

“Our plans are to really look at things across the school and ways that we can be more efficient while still making sure that we’re providing the academic excellence that we expect to deliver for our students,” the dean said. “Some of that may be combining some (academic) units together.”

 

The discussions with departments about this are just starting. “We want to make sure that we’re doing this in a fair way, which still maintains the strengths of the departments, both on the academic side and on the research side, while being more efficient in the administrative side.”

 

He stressed that this does not mean they are looking at eliminating any departments, instead they are looking for areas that are “naturally aligned and administratively could be combined in a way which still maintains our majors, minors and certificates and the research strengths of the school, while being more efficient in administrative overhead.”

 

What it would do is combine some of the faculty administrative jobs, Leibovich said. For instance, if three units are combined into one, then instead of three chairs, three directors of undergraduate studies and three directors of graduate studies — all administrative roles held by faculty members — there would only be one of each.

 

Reducing the number of faculty in administrative roles would reduce the amount of administrative add-on costs that the school has to pay and reduce the need for part-time faculty because the former faculty-administrators can now teach more classes.

 

Leibovich said this sort of realignment is not uncommon in higher ed, and he expects it to be long process here.

 

“We will want to make sure that what we’re doing makes sense for those units,” he said. “I’m expecting that not everyone will be happy with this. So we want to make sure that we do our best to do this in a way which people are as comfortable as possible.”

 

He said if everything went “very smoothly,” the earliest the realignment could happen is by next academic year, but he’s not imposing any sort of timeline right now. They also plan to involve the school’s shared governance units and the faculty union in the process.

 

For Dietrich School staff, this type of realignment has already happened. After a voluntary early retirement program in 2012, Jessica Hatherill said, the school started “looking at how, given reduced numbers of staff, our academic departments could be supported.”

 

Hatherill, who is Dietrich’s executive director for administration, said most of the social science departments are served by a combined staff. Physics, astronomy, geology and environmental sciences also are supported by a group staff, as are the language departments.

 

“More recently, our arts departments have been supported by an integrated staff,” she said. “If you’re doing performances and ticketing for theater or music, there’s some common knowledge, expertise, skills that are necessary, and they’re having to solve the same types of problems.”

One of the other changes the school is considering is increasing the class-size minimum from the long-standing 15 to 18. 

 

“Our classes have caps that are higher than that. We don’t want our classes to (just) meet the minimum,” Leibovich said. “What we’re really doing is saying that you really should be going more than that basic minimum that we’ve had before.”

 

The school’s administration does cancel classes that don’t look like they are going to meet the minimum, but departments can ask for an exception if needed.

 

In discussions with department chairs, Leibovich said they also talked about certain classes that run with small cohorts every term or every year, “and we might be able to change the frequency of the course, still making it available to our students, but perhaps less frequently.”

 

Hatherill said they want units to be more aware of the pattern of how students take courses, particularly electives, and how students’ needs and the units’ own instructional resources mesh.

 

This year’s first-year class at the Dietrich School is expected to end up slightly lower than the target of 3,300 (the official census comes out next month), but Leibovich said it will still probably be the school’s third largest and it replaces a class that was around 3,000. Because of the larger than normal first-year class last year, Dietrich’s student body is still at record highs.

 

He said what they don’t want is “huge swings, because that’s hard. If you have a huge swing with a lot of first-year students, they are taking classes which are for first-year students primarily. That makes it hard on all the departments that are servicing those students. At the same time, the chancellor has a goal of increasing the undergraduate student body, which is why we think a target probably for the next few years around 3,300 makes sense.”

Leibovich stressed that the reallocations that the University has done over the past two fiscal years are not because Pitt is struggling, but “to make sure that we remain fiscally stable,” which is how Pinkney has repeatedly characterized these reductions. 

 

“We are going through a traumatic time in higher ed overall,” Leibovich said. “Public perception seems to be getting a little bit better, but it’s still not where we would want it to be. We feel, I think, as a university, and I certainly feel, as dean of arts and sciences, that we are educating the next generation. We are doing important research to help strengthen the country, the state, the city and humans in general. And we are educating our students with an extremely robust curriculum. 

 

“Our students are graduating and getting jobs at extremely high rates compared to our peers. I think we are in great shape, and we want to make sure that we continue to do that to the best of our abilities, which is why we are being careful right now to make sure that the Deitrich School of Arts and Sciences and Pitt overall can remain on strong fiscal standing, and I am very hopeful for the future as we move through this.”

 

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

 

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