IN 2002, I WAS A NEW ASSISTANT PROFESSOR at a large public research university and fortunate to be selected for the Transatlantisches interkulturelles Nachwuchsforderungsprogramm Deutsch als Fremdsprache (TraiNDaF; Transatlantic Intercultural Promotional Program for Young Talent in German as a Foreign Language), a leadership program of the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG), and to meet its executive director, Helene Zimmer-Loew. I was also fortunate to have three tenured colleagues. Just twelve years later, due to retirements that did not lead to replacement tenure lines, I now have one tenure-track colleague and the assistance of colleagues in one and a half adjunct positions to support an MA program with five graduate students and a BA program with approximately forty majors and sixty minors. This same scenario is playing out in college and university German programs across the country. However, inspired by Zimmer-Loew's boundless optimism, we at the University of Arkansas have learned how to make do with less in a program that continues to grow. Given the trend of fewer permanent colleagues in the academia of the future, this paper explores how the lessons of TraiNDaF and Zimmer-Loew's guidance have been applied successfully in a thriving German program.

One of the first lessons of the TraiNDaF program was to view crises as opportunities. The alarm has certainly been sounded with regard to language programs in general and, more recently, German studies. The crisis in leadership at the University of Virginia in the spring of 2012 was sparked in part due to university president Teresa Sullivan's advocacy for UVA's classical studies and German programs, which were claimed to be underperforming and were scheduled for elimination; the Washington Post article on the event referred to them as “obscure academic departments.” In the July–August 2012 issue of the Journal of Higher Education, Steven Brint and colleagues noted that German studies exhibited the “most dramatic form of decline,” a phenomenon in which existing programs are dropped at high rates, while new German programs are not added at other institutions.