Dear CGES faculty and staff, MAGES students, and alumni,
On behalf of the BMW Center leadership, I convey with deep sadness news of the passing of Graf Goltz Professor Emeritus Samuel Barnes on May 21, 2024 in Concord, California after an extended illness. You will find an official obituary here, which provides a wonderful sense of Samuel Barnes as a person and as an accomplished academic.
For all of us connected to the BMW Center, Sam — as he was known to both friends and colleagues — will always be remembered as the founding director of the Center and the faculty member most directly responsible for shaping the mission, curriculum, and culture of the MAGES program. Sam arrived on the Hilltop in 1991 after 31 distinguished years at the University of Michigan as both scholar and administrator. The task before him was daunting — to take the Georgetown School of Foreign Service’s new Center of Excellence in German and European Studies, which existed only on paper, and transform it into a physical space running a functioning academic program for real people: faculty, staff, and most important, students. Together with the Center’s assistant director, Gregory Flynn, Sam accomplished these goals in a remarkably short period of time, and his legacy has been enduring: The BMW Center and its academic program, the Master of Arts in German and European Studies, are flourishing more than three decades later in both form and function that Sam would easily recognize as his original blueprint.
When I learned of Sam’s passing, I immediately reached out to former Georgetown University President Leo O’Donovan and former SFS Dean Peter Krogh to relay the sad news. Each responded with a memory about Sam that is worth sharing.
“When Georgetown, in competition with other major universities, won a $10 million grant from the German government to establish a Center for German and European Studies, we were told that our proposal, which included the creation of a new Masters degree, was the best that had been received. We then proceeded to hire the best possible leadership team for the new creation. With great good fortune, this consisted of Sam Barnes as Director of the Center and Greg Flynn as Director of the Masters Program. They came out of central casting for these rolls as team to lead the enterprise. They were the equivalent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Together, and in short order, they established a world-class program that, at the end of its first decade, was embraced, and permanently endowed, by BMW’s Quandt Foundation. Seldom in the annals of academic institution building has there been such a stunning success. Though now both sadly departed, their achievement lives on as a rich and lasting legacy.”
-Peter F. Krogh, Dean Emeritus, the Walsh School of Foreign Service.
“As President of Georgetown University when Sam arrived to direct our new Center for German and European Studies in 1991, I had the blessed opportunity to become a great admirer, and indeed friend, of Sam and his incomparable wife Anne. … Sam was the ideal founding Director for our new Center: brilliant, diplomatic, cosmopolitan, far-seeing, marvelous (and decidedly Southern) company and the kind of colleague you dream of, ready with steady advice but also patient beyond imagining. Georgetown could not have chosen better, nor could I personally have been more fortunate, in the company of this extraordinary couple.”
-Father Leo J. O’Donovan
The CGES faculty will come together this fall, at the start of the new academic year, to consider lasting ways that the BMW Center can commemorate Sam’s profound contributions to the Center. We welcome your ideas too.
Take care and best wishes,
Professor Jeff Anderson, MAGES Academic Director
