USC announces it will no longer offer German major or minor

USC is eliminating the study of German as a major over the next three years and dismantling the department except for some basic language courses, officials said. Faculty and students are protesting the move, saying it will harm the university’s national reputation for scholarship.

The German department at the Los Angeles campus is relatively small, with three full-time professors, three lecturers, 10 undergraduate majors and 10 minors, said its chairman, Gerhard Clausing. He said the university has starved the department of funds and new hires in recent years and is now making a serious mistake in reducing it further.

Clausing, who has taught at USC for 32 years, said he will retire this summer rather than be assigned to a department where he would feel like an outsider. He predicted USC will be criticized nationally as scholars notice “that this area is missing at USC.”

Michael Quick, executive vice dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, described the move as mainly administrative. With the department’s small size and the likelihood of faculty retirements, Quick said it could no longer function as a separate entity. Professors will be transferred to other departments, such as linguistics.

Students with a major or minor in German will be allowed to finish their programs, but no new ones will be added. German language classes will be offered “as long as there is demand,” and Quick held out the possibility that a major might be reconstituted in the future. A doctoral program in German was cut about a decade ago. “I do think colleges and universities evolve,” Quick said. “In some ways departments come and go over time as we think about what a college should do in the 21st century.” For example, he said USC is now adding resources to its programs in Asian and Middle Eastern languages and cultures.

Howard Gillman, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, stressed that the change “does not mean that we don’t respect the contributions of German culture and language.” He noted that several other languages don’t have their own departments, such as Japanese and Chinese, which are in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.

Jennifer Appleby, a junior majoring in both German and comparative literature, said she was “appalled” by the university’s decision.

“I know it’s a small department. But having a German department is just standard in a university this large of this caliber,” she said, citing German influence on European and American culture.

Thomas Seifrid, chairman of USC’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, said he was disturbed by the decision to cut the German department and said it would be “a serious loss” if the major is not retained. Doctoral students in his department must be able to read German, and they might lose the courses needed for that as German course offerings shrink, he said.

Enrollment in German language classes at U.S. colleges and universities is less than half its Cold War-era peak. According to a recent study by the Modern Language Assn., German classes grew rapidly in the 1960s to more than 216,000 students by 1968 and then declined to about 94,000 by 2006, although there was a slight growth in recent years.

In comparison, the number of students studying Japanese has skyrocketed from about 4,300 in 1968 to 66,600 in 2006. Spanish, the most popular college language, more than doubled over the same period, to 823,000.

German enrollment is up about 3% since 2002, a development that heartens Helene Zimmer-Loew, executive director of the American Assn. of Teachers of German, a New Jersey-based group. She said she has heard of no other major university discontinuing a German department.

“Add all the languages you want, but let’s not drop any, particularly any of the important ones like German,” she said.

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larry.gordon@latimes.com