To quote the article directly: "while [Harvard] faculty searches are not frozen, Smith urged department heads to carefully weigh whether the positions are critical to Harvard’s academic program."
But clearly the decline in endowments are pressing all the major private schools. Their presidents call for hiring freeze.
I was told by someone from a teaching college a couple months ago that they were not hiring this year because of decline in their (modest) endowment, so there may already have been an effect from this in the form of reduced JOE ads.
In short, unlike the stock market recovers, hiring could worsen badly.