Is foreign-language teaching at the college level simply a numbers game? Put another way, should administrators follow the feet of students as they make their wishes known by the courses they choose? Sure, if universities conceive of themselves as trade schools preparing their students for employment. If that is really the aim, administrators could--and perhaps will--cut history courses, art, English, creative writing, music, philosophy, and much else. Which would leave business, computer science, engineering, the hard sciences, and maybe a smattering of world culture to help hard-nosed employees of the future avoid making gaffes on their international jaunts. The business model is the larger context for understanding the recent closure of the German department at the private University of Southern California and the proposal to end German at the public Humboldt State University. What is happening to German can happen to any language--and has. Some years ago, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst abolished its department of Slavic languages and literatures after nearly 30 years of existence. What has happened is nothing less than a loss of faith in a liberal-arts education--hardly news, but perhaps the full consequences haven't been so clear until now. In this article, the authors contend that the closing of foreign-language departments is part of the decline of the liberal arts, and that's a tragedy.