This paper takes a specific university Department of Romance Languages as a case study to examine how the measures it adopted in view of increasing enrollment in Spanish in the nineties coincide with the recommendations in the MLA's 2007 report; it also examines how they have fared after some 12 years of implementation, advances explanations for their success or failure, and offers suggestions for improvement. While examining well-established language programs, it discusses issues of governance, faculty and curriculum pertaining to the overall field of foreign languages and cultures. The initiatives proposed here aim at placing language study in a field of interacting factors to better adjust to the "inter-" and "trans-disciplinarity" of today's world.