Stephen Barnes Is Circling the Globe to Create an International Family at Penn State Law

Who would do it if Stephen Barnes would not?

Who else would travel the world, directly touching 25 nations as Penn State Law’s assistant dean for graduate and international programs? 

Who else but Stephen Barnes would constantly trick his body to overcome jet lag?  (Barnes has collected 271 airline boarding passes during six years in his current role—and the pandemic cost him 18 months of travel.)

And who else would ingest creepy-crawly creatures just to avoid offending hosts at an Asian dinner?  (Silkworms, according to Barnes, “are crunchy like crickets and taste like chicken.”) 

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It’s a lovely August evening in State College, and I’m sitting in a picnic pavilion at Sunset Park. I can’t avoid a few sentimental thoughts of 50 years ago when I played ball at this very park during an office picnic. But tonight, there’s no baseball connection except for the Phillies hat that Steve Barnes is wearing backwards.

Barnes is warm and animated as he offers words of welcome during this opening activity for the fall semester. His listeners include a few Penn State Law staff members and 135 of the 200+ international students who will be studying in the law school this fall.

Several children are also present, including a 7-year-old girl from Kazakhstan. This little lady steals the show from Barnes, much to his delight. Stephen has just begun a mock-serious description of how to make S’mores, and she politely offers to help.

Urged on by the assistant dean, the sweet little girl stands up on a picnic bench and clearly articulates the process for making this chocolate and marshmallow delight. She just came to America with her mom in January and spoke very little English at that time. But here she is on Aug. 5, projecting her voice and offering instruction to a large crowd of lawyers and judges.

For Barnes, this was the perfect segue to a theme he stressed that night and during later orientation events. 

“You’ve got to find your voice,” he said. Noting the students’ current distance from cultural, political or familial restraints in their homelands, he encouraged their free expression of thought at Penn State. “We welcome different points of view,” he said. “We welcome your voice. It might be unpopular or unconventional, but we want to hear it.” 

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METHOD TO HIS MADNESS?

Lots of people would say that Steve Barnes’ travel schedule is close to crazy. And he understands that view, admitting that in a non-pandemic year he spends only eight to 10 weeks at home. Yet it must also be noted that this globetrotter gets wonderful results.

Pedup Dukpa, the first student from Bhutan to study at Penn State Law, offered his perspective during the Sunset Park picnic. “Had it not been for him,” the newly-enrolled Dukpa says, “the law school would not have all these students here from (more than) 40 countries. I feel that the international student reach is mostly because of the hard work that he puts in.“

I got that same impression a year ago when I interviewed twins from Colombia who have since graduated from Penn State Law. (Like most other internationals, they had earned bachelor’s degrees in law at home and then came here for an LLM, a “master of laws.”)

Both Fulbright scholars, Indira and Angelica Ricaurte Villalobos had many choices for study in America such as University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin and University of Southern California. When I asked why they chose Penn State, both said two words: “Stephen Barnes.”

The twins are from an Afro-Colombian background, so they were concerned about the racial climate in America. Only Penn State gave them the chance to meet a top university official on their soil, and Angelica was especially moved by Barnes’ portrayal of Happy Valley. 

“He told me, ‘Angelica, if you are going to come to Penn State, you are not going to suffer from discrimination from the color of your skin or because you are a woman. If you come to Penn State, you are going to have a lot of opportunities,’” she said. “When he said that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s what I wanted to hear.’”

When Barnes assumed his current role in 2015, Penn State was attracting 60-something international students each year. But due to the assistant dean’s tireless travel and the efforts of his marvelous team representing eight nations, the LLM program has grown dramatically. This semester, 227 students from 45 nations are studying law in the Katz Building, the modernistic glassy structure across from the Arboretum.

WEAR AND TEAR?

But Stephen, what about the reality of jet lag? How do you deal with being a much-too-frequent-flier?  “Sometimes I’ll hit five countries in five weeks,” Barnes says, “and then I’ll come home for a week. So I haven’t recovered, but I’ll just keep going. I’ve learned to trick my body to adapt to any time zone. I run every morning at 5:30 a.m., wherever I land, at whatever time my plane might land. I mean, running is like my energy, running is my caffeine. 

“So I’ll go for maybe an hour and a half run. And I’ll get the layout of the city. I’ll see what people are doing in parks and what the average person is doing. When I travel, I go in there as a learner.”

The study of other nations is almost instinctual for Barnes. Indeed, he grew up with a lot of international travel and he gained a respect and love for other cultures. 

LEARNING LANGUAGES, LOVING CULTURES

Stephen Barnes was raised by a pair of internationally oriented parents. His father completed a Ph.D. in Germany, so Stephen lived there from age eight to age 10. Then, during his dad’s academic career as a professor of international marketing, the family had many opportunities to travel overseas. (It should be noted that Steve’s mom served as a volunteer Head Start teacher, so the family has made a deep and broad impact through education.)

But it was a one-year period as an exchange student in Skara, Sweden that made the greatest impression on Barnes. 

“The Persson family adopted me as their own,” he says, “and so did my high school. That experience as a 16-year-old was a game-changer. I’d like to think that all my international work was inspired by that special year, and I want our students to have the same experience at Penn State.”

Today, Barnes is a walking repository of languages. Specifically, he is fluent in French, proficient in Chinese and Swedish and “gets about” in German and Russian. (“I speak enough Russian to get into jail but not enough to get out,” he says.)

He may be a language pro, but Barnes is even more enamored with cultures. And that’s why he avoids a tourist mentality and takes the road less traveled. 

“I don’t stay at the Hilton,” he says. “I stay in the local places, sometimes a dodgy hotel. But that’s where you meet the real people.”

WHAT’S THE MOTIVATION?

Barnes loves Happy Valley and unashamedly promotes its beauty to prospective students. So why doesn’t he spend more time here? (Barnes is gone so often that he offered his sizable office to a colleague and moved into a remodeled storage area.)  

“I marvel at flight,” the graduate of the University of Oregon School of Law says. “It just amazes me that I can be in State College and then, 18 hours later, in Beijing. I’m excited when I board a plane.” 

Yet there’s a deeper reason for Barnes to fly off to such far-flung locations as Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.    

“This is going to sound cheesy,” he told me one day as we enjoyed some Panera coffee, “but I say that there are five things that bring the world together: food, sports, art, music and education. Those are the things that unite people. We’re talking world peace; we’re talking about understanding, collaboration and compromise. I love the other four, but my work is in higher ed, education. And so for me, this is building a better world.  

“We have Iranian students who become best friends with Saudis here, and I could probably pick a more extreme example than that. We see Pakistanis and Indians becoming roommates, best friends. All of our students might have pre-set opinions about certain cultures, but as they’re engaged together in the classroom, these labels and stereotypes disappear. I guess that’s my love and peace answer, but that’s what really drives me.”

INDIVIDUAL CONNECTIONS

That’s not all that drives the native of Utah, however. He’s known for his capacity to truly focus on an individual’s needs. Such concern shows when he’s reaching out to a potential student, encouraging a struggling student at the law school or visiting a proud alumnus back home. And that last opportunity is his favorite.

Barnes says that the most fulfilling part of his job is “visiting our graduates two years later in their home countries and seeing how they’re thriving. I see the impact they have on their communities as professors, judges, law partners. And when I see them with their parents…their parents are beyond grateful. In some cases, this has improved their whole family economically.”

Isa Ferrera can personally vouch for Barnes’ perspective. She earned her LLM from Penn State in 2017 and now serves on his team as Latin American Program director. In that capacity, she traveled with Barnes to Honduras for law seminars and networking among prospective students.

Not surprisingly, Steve insisted on visiting her family.

 “He met my grandpa, and my grandpa doesn’t speak English,” Isa says. “And Steve doesn’t speak Spanish. But they became such good friends through his broken Spanish and my grandpa’s broken English. Later, my grandpa wrote a letter and sent it with me to Steve. Steve still has that letter in his office; it’s hanging there. And they still call each other ‘hermano,’ which means brother.

“He is so loved by everyone because he does things with his heart. Sometimes when you work in a big institution and you see this monster of bureaucracy, it’s (important) to find someone that will truly care.”

NOT A PARACHUTIST

Although Barnes often pays brief visits to overseas universities where he has key contacts, his bread-and-butter is to spend two weeks on a campus, teaching a course, lecturing on American law and building relationships. This approach was influenced by observations he made while serving as a visiting professor of law at three Chinese universities.

“When I was in China,” he recalls, “I saw European and American universities come over and I would call them parachutists. They’d parachute in for a day and say, ‘Here’s our university. Here’s our program. Here’s our pamphlet. Here’s our website.’

“That doesn’t work. So my thing is, ‘I’m going to linger. We’re gonna learn about your institution. We’re gonna learn about your needs.’“

Such an approach helped Barnes secure his current post at Penn State, and it continues to fuel his effectiveness. 

“He’s not just selling a program,” says Russell Shaffer, Penn State Law’s assistant dean for operations and planning. “He’s meeting people and offering them an opportunity to do something special.

“I remember when we interviewed people from other schools who were interested in this job. And they would say, ‘I make phone calls; I send a lot of email.’ What stood out about Steve is that he wanted to go out into the world and talk to people, to look them in the eye.”

FAMILY IN HAPPY VALLEY

Barnes is the father of three grown children and grandfather of seven, and he says, “Family is everything to me. Everything.” 

No wonder, then, that Barnes and his team are always seeking to develop an international family within the LLM program. “They come as strangers,” he says, “and then five minutes later, they’re acquaintances. Thirty minutes later, they’re friends. And when we duplicate this event (the Sunset Park picnic) in May, there won’t be a dry eye here. They won’t want to go because they’ve become a family.” 

Meanwhile, the State College community plays a role in providing a warm experience to students who come from megacities like Mumbai, Delhi, Beijing and Shanghai.  

Says Barnes, “My selling point, if you will, is to say, ‘If you’re coming to the United States for one year, do it in a campus town, not a city. And so they come here and they’re just blown away.  That’s our secret sauce: the community, the friendly people.

“Happy Valley is a cheesy moniker. But once they’re here for a couple weeks, any cynicism has worn off. This is a really happy place. Not a single LLM student has left State College disappointed. And when they leave here, this is their America. When they come back for a visit, they’re not going to New York or Philly; they’re coming back to State College.” 

Of course, I’m guessing that one of the first people these returning alums will hope to visit is Steve Barnes. Perhaps they’ll be lucky and he’ll actually be in State College when they arrive.