ORONO – The University of Maine’s German program hasn’t seen any “significant growth” in enrollment for a long time, isn’t required by many other majors, and has no apparent connection to the state’s economy, a UM official said Wednesday.

But it will be up to an “impact committee” next fall to determine whether the German major should, in fact, be phased out, said Douglas Gelinas, UM’s associate vice president for academic affairs.

Gelinas was getting his turn at bat Wednesday, the day after a column appeared in the Bangor Daily News in which chairmen and directors of UM’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences denounced his recommendation to look into the elimination of the German major.

They disagreed with his previous statements that the program’s 17 students constituted a small enrollment, and said they were “dismayed” by his assertions that the major “offers limited potential for growth and is neither central to the university’s academic mission nor responding to clear educational or economical needs of the state.”

Faculty said all 50 “flagship” universities in the United States have German major programs, that German is taught at 35 Maine high schools to more than 1,600 students, that more than 1,000 German companies have subsidiaries in the United States who are seeking bilingual employees and that, aside from Canadians, the largest number of Maine’s tourists are German and Japanese.

Eliminating UM”s major would effectively do away with German literature classes, but leave German language instruction courses, said Gelinas.

On Wednesday Gelinas stuck to his guns. “There doesn’t seem to me to be an integral connection between students graduating with degrees in German and the Maine economy,” he said. “If there is, we certainly would like to discover that as part of the impact committee.”

Since the university would still teach German as a language, the tourist industry’s reliance on German-speaking employees wouldn’t be affected, he said.

Gelinas said he was unfamiliar with the rate at which German high school teachers were retiring. “We don’t know what the demand for replacement would be,” he said.

The associate vice president said there were “few, if any, majors that require German, unlike math or English or biology … that are required parts of other people’s programs.”

Whether 17 students is a small enrollment is “a matter of opinion,” he said.

But he pointed out that a program on “new media” has more than 100 majors, while a program in communication and journalism has nearly 300 majors.

Also entering into his recommendation to review the German major is that two of the three faculty members “have expressed an interest in retiring in the fairly near future,” he said.

Gelinas said he wasn’t surprised at the outpouring of support for the program. “I understand for faculty members in the German program that this is a very serious issue. They have a commitment to the program, and the fact that a couple of them are thinking of retiring fairly soon shows it’s not an issue of saving their jobs. It’s really the program they’re concerned about. So there’s no bad feelings about their doing everything they can to try and convince us and other people that the program is valuable and useful.”

The impact committee will comprise faculty and administration members, who will spend a semester talking to staff, students and others and ultimately will make a recommendation that will go to Provost Robert Kennedy, then to President Peter Hoff and, last, to the board of trustees, which has the final say, Gelinas said.

Since UM has a commitment to having students complete a program, any phaseout would take place over several years, Gelinas said.

Eliminating the German major would save the equivalent of the salaries of two entry-level faculty positions, Gelinas said. The funds would be reallocated for “new positions created in other areas where there is increasing student enrollment,” he said.

Gelinas said UM is doing what universities always are having to do: “tak[ing] a look at how it’s using its resources based on which majors are getting bigger and smaller.”

“A number of programs in a number of colleges where enrollment is small” also will be reviewed, said Gelinas, who declined to go into detail about the other programs because staff members may not have been notified.

In some instances only a program’s structure may need to be changed, while in other cases a phaseout out may be called for, he said.

The size of a program doesn’t necessarily dictate whether it will be cut, the associate vice president said. Some programs in agriculture or forestry have relatively small enrollments but are “extremely important to the economy of Maine in some way,” he said.