AT THE 2014 MODERN LANGUAGE Association (MLA) Convention in Chicago, the Presidential Forum “Vulnerable Times” and the session “Constructive Responses to Current Challenges Faced by German Languages, Literatures, and Studies Departments,” sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), reflected the tenor of the times. The economic downturn and the resulting fiscal challenges to higher education in the United States have left a wake of programmatic, institutional, and professional change, uncertainty, and opportunity. The humanities in general have been especially susceptible to hasty reactions by administrators regarding program and class size, cost of instruction, and limited external research funding. This is by no means a new or unfamiliar scenario for those of us who teach German; indeed, this recent MLA panel is merely a continuation of the productive dialogues that German studies professionals have been holding at conferences for a number of years. The AATG has been at the forefront of this trend, regularly sponsoring sessions at both the German Studies Association (GSA) and MLA conferences to explore issues confronting the profession and proactive measures that can be initiated in response.

In 2011, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming argued that the long-term survival of German will be dependent upon broad-based approaches to the discipline that take into account many of the recommendations made in the report released by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages in 2007. The media in recent years have bombarded us with contrasting, often contradictory, and most definitely incomplete data about the numbers of students studying German. Fueled by reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed about the reorganization and elimination of programs and faculty in the humanities at colleges and universities, uninformed readers are led to believe that the death of German is imminent. The leading disciplinary organizations in the field of foreign languages, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), and the MLA, all have conducted surveys and collected data on the number of Americans learning languages from kindergarten through postgraduate study. These survey numbers shed a different light on the information that has garnered media headlines. Surprisingly, both the ACTFL and the 2009 MLA data indicate that there was an overall increase in the number of learners studying German across all levels.