French program sees large turnover, seeks to hire

Since 2012, three out of six tenured or tenured-track professors have said au-revoir to UNC’s French program — but the major is looking to bring in a new professor soon.

Hannelore Jarausch , the director of the French language program, said two professors left because they received generous offers, and they went together to the University of Sydney in Australia at the end of 2013 academic year. Another professor left because of personal reasons.

“People leave the University for different reasons,” she said. “Sometimes they feel they are pushed out, and sometimes they are pulled out by attractive offers from other schools.”

She said she doesn’t think the professors’ leaving has anything to do with the budget cuts, but she added the program lacked the funding for recruiting new professors.

“We would like to hire additional faculty persons, but we have not received the funding,” she said.

Hassan Melehy , the graduate student adviser for the French program, said the two professors who went to Australia would probably have stayed with a bigger salary increase.

Jarausch said having fewer professors doesn’t affect the language program at all.

But since one professor is on leave for research this year and another professor is also teaching in the Department of Asian Studies , there are fewer courses provided this spring and fall semester.

Melehy said the budget cuts require them to increase the number of students they admit to each class.

“They used to have a class cap of 20, but now the cap is 30,” he said. “It would be considered too expensive if we have too few students in each class.”

He said because the number of students increases in classes, students may not receive enough attention from the instructors.

Having fewer professors also creates some problems in the graduate program. It has been difficult for some previous and incoming graduate students to find a dissertation adviser.

The program hired a new professor last year, but Jarausch said it will take a while before graduate students can write their dissertations with the new professor.

Monica Scovell , a second-year doctoral student in the department, said having fewer professors is difficult for people in her year because there are fewer professors in the committees and fewer professors to be their advisers.

“It’s difficult for people who are in my stage now and people this year will kind of have the same problem until their positions to be replaced,” she said.

“It’s really unfortunate for the students that all this happened at the same time,” she said.

Melehy said the program would really like to be able to hire French professors very soon. He said the graduate faculty is down to four now, and they would like to have six professors.

“We would at least like to have a fifth position as soon as possible,” he said.

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