Presidents of the Past—James B. Barnes (1987-2006)
Rebirth of a University
By Malachi Nutter
Born in Akron, James B. Barnes was raised in Barberton, Ohio where he played basketball and football in high school, before graduating in 1960. The Barnes family was far from rich, with both of Jim’s grandmothers living with them at one time or another, his mother working a second shift job at points, and Jim himself getting a job at a store to help support the family. Jim’s father was an electrician at the Barberton PPG plant for almost his entire life, where two thousand employees worked to produce caustic soda, chlorine bleach, and similar chemicals.
“I can’t believe my dad worked there for forty years and never got cancer from breathing all of that stuff,” Barnes later said. “I remember as a kid that the [PPG] plant put out so much soot that when you got up in the morning, you could go outside and run your hand across the roof of the car and your hand was literally black.” Barnes also remembers the city would purchase cinders from the plant and spread them on the streets as an alternative to pavement or gravel.
While Barnes’ parents were uninterested in Christianity, both of Jim’s grandmothers were members of the Barberton Wesleyan Methodist Church, leading to Barnes going there many times. “Even though my parents were not Christians when I was growing up, they were so sensitive to what other people would think,” Barnes once explained. “They would not let me go to movies. And when we finally got a television set, my mom made my dad put the antenna in the attic instead of on the roof because they didn’t want people to know we had a TV. They thought a TV was the devil’s influence.”
When he decided to attend college, he was the first person in his family to do so as his mother never graduated high school and his father took just a few college courses before dropping out. Indeed, the only reason Barnes even considered college as a possibility for his future was due to other high school classmates talking about where they were going to go. After graduation, Jim Barnes worked at the PPG plant for a year-and-a-half during which time he became certain he wanted to do something different with his future.
Barnes’ first attempt at college was an English composition class at the University of Akron, but the experience was so horrible he soon left. Not deterred from pursuing his education, Barnes next tried Kent State University. For the next year Barnes took night classes at Kent State while working, all the while enjoying his classes more and more. While visiting his cousin, Renee, Jim decided he wanted to give the school she attended a try. The following summer, James Barnes started his freshman year at Marion College. Before long, he met a fellow freshman name Tommie Schade, and the pair soon began dating. Over the course of the next four years, Jim became president of the student council, meeting with peers and then-president Woodrow Goodman, while also serving as part of the choir. During their time at Marion College, Jim and Tommie met a fellow student from Puerto Rico who they befriended, leading to them also developing a love for Puerto Rico. During their senior year, Tommie was named the homecoming queen. In May of 1965, Tommie graduated with a degree in education and Jim graduated with a degree in Social Sciences.
Just three months later, in August 1965, Jim and Tommie were married at College Wesleyan Church. Within the next few years, his younger sister would follow him into a college education, following the road he paved for his family towards higher education.
Not long after getting married, Jim and Tommie applied to move to Puerto Rico to teach in a Wesleyan Academy through the Department of World Missions of the Wesleyan Church. Not hearing anything back for a while, the couple began to become dejected, with Jim putting in an application for a job teaching in the Barberton school system where Tommie was already teaching. Although this job was not what he and Tommie hoped for, it was a very nice position, making it easier for the Barnes family to become more alright with staying in the area. As Jim Barnes descended the stairs on the day he was to sign a contract for the job, however, the upstairs phone rang. Deciding to see who it was, Barnes ran back up and discovered it was the Department of World Missions calling to tell him that he and Tommie were approved to go to Puerto Rico. Speaking about it later, Barnes noted if the phone rang just thirty seconds later, he would not have heard it, would have gone to the school, and would have signed the contract for the teaching position.
The following two years in Puerto Rico were some of the most fulfilling of the Barnes’ lives, with Jim later saying, “I felt like I could have stayed there for a lifetime. I loved Puerto Rico, the culture of the people and the climate. I was getting fluent enough in Spanish that I could understand people pretty well and we were going to a Spanish-speaking church.”
After those two years, however, Jim and Tommie were beginning to want children, something the Department of World Missions preferred their missionaries do without, if possible. “Married couples got paid the same amount, and if one could not work, it increased the cost for World Missions,” Barnes once explained.
As a result, the couple moved to Tommie’s hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, where Jim began to teach part time at Trevecca Nazarene College while also earning an Educational Specialist degree. In 1970, Barnes began to apply for other jobs at a variety of places, including Central Wesleyan College in South Carolina (later renamed Southern Wesleyan University). Due to a faculty member going on leave for two years, there was an opening which Jim Barnes happily took, as Tommie found a job in the local public schools. As the faculty member he was filling in for never ended up returning, Barnes was given his position at Central Wesleyan for as long as he wanted it.
During the six years he taught history at Central Wesleyan College, Barnes also commuted seventy miles to the University of Georgia to complete his doctorate. In the spring of 1976, the president of Central Wesleyan offered Jim the Dean of Students position. At first this sounded amazing to Jim, but once the initial surprise and joy wore off, he realized it was not where he needed to be. When he told the president of Central Wesleyan he could not accept the offer, Barnes was told the Academic Dean at Marion College called and asked for a meeting with Barnes, with the job at Central Wesleyan offered as their way of keeping him from leaving. Barnes spoke with the Academic Dean at his alma mater, and by the end of the year returned to Marion College as staff.
From 1976 until 1979, Barnes served as the Chairman of the Division of Continuing Education, before moving to the position of Dean of Academic Development and receiving the title Dean of the College in 1983. When President Robert Luckey announced his retirement, Barnes, who was one of Luckey’s most trusted advisors and dedicated employees, knew his name was under consideration as a potential replacement for the presidency.
Knowing the current data indicated Marion College was headed towards difficult days in its future and needed to take steps to avoid falling into hardship, Barnes stated as much when interviewed as a candidate. “It wasn’t necessarily doom and gloom, but it was being realistic,” Barnes later explained. In the end, the board ended up choosing charismatic recent arrival James Hill as Luckey’s successor—a decision which came as a disappointing blow to the Barnes family.
“We were living in Upland, and Tommie said we didn’t have to go to church on Sunday morning if I didn’t want to go,” Barnes later said. “But I said, no, we’ve got to be there and sit where we normally sit and life has to go on. So we went to church, and it was a little painful, because [the pastor] announced Jim Hill’s selection and then congratulated him. Looking back, it was all part of God’s plan.”
Not long after Hill was named as the sixth president of Marion College, Barnes chose to resign as Dean of the College. The following year was spent at Wesleyan Church headquarters in Marion, which Jim and Tommie later described as the longest year of their lives. On July 1, 1985, Jim Barnes became the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Houghton College, with Tommie hired to supervise student teachers there. Just two weeks before the end of their first year at Houghton, however, Barnes learned of Hill’s sudden resignation from the presidency of Marion College.
The Barnes family was in the middle of building a house in the expectation Houghton would become their permanent new home, with their children, Christy and Kevin, settling into new schools. Suddenly they were receiving calls from the General Secretary of Education and Ministry for the Wesleyan Church informing him the Board of Trustees at Marion College wanted him back as Hill’s replacement. The amount of time between Hill’s resignation and Barnes’ hiring was six months—a faster process than any other presidential hiring throughout Marion College’s history. Indeed, although thirty names were first suggested for Hill’s replacement only five were given the offer to submit their resumes and only Barnes was interviewed.
Although he remained with Houghton until the end of the 1986-1987 academic year, the loss of Barnes after just two years came as a blow to Houghton. For the entirety of the spring semester of 1987, Barnes got into the habit of traveling to Marion one week each month to get re-acclimated to the campus. At the time Marion College was without a home for the president, due to the previous presidents’ home becoming the counseling center. As such, the Barnes family would live in temporary housing when they arrived during the summer. Even so, this was no deterrent. “We said sure,” Barnes later stated. “So Tommie and I and our two children lived in an apartment at Colonial Oaks Retirement Center for a year while a new home was being built for us on campus.”
On June 1, 1987, Dr. James B. Barnes became the president of a college on the brink of bankruptcy as a result of financial decisions made by administration over the previous few years. The situation became so bad the school was forced to borrow money to meet payroll and was out of endowment and annuity funds. “The Board of Trustees had not disclosed everything to me,” Barnes later said. “I’m not even sure the Board knew how bad it was.”
While Hill’s first year was a marked success, the intervening time left the school unable to balance the budget and operating in the red, with the Noggle Christian Ministries Center—previously paid off—gaining a mortgage. In addition, Hill’s pet project, LEAP, was losing the school money, and on Barnes’ first day it received an audit. “I arrived in the office at about 7:30 AM. At 8:30 AM an accreditation team from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools arrived in my office to begin their evaluation of the LEAP program!” Barnes described in the year’s Presidential Report. “The outcome was a very positive and enthusiastic evaluation which gave full approval.” While LEAP was still not bringing in revenue, the fact it was deemed of high caliber was at least a good sign for its future.
Two weeks after this, on June 15, Barnes was told the college lacked the money to make payroll for its employees. Barnes’ response was to go to First National Bank and take out a loan. This was repeated in July and August, but Barnes later said, “after those three months, we never had to borrow money again.”
Barnes believed one of his top responsibilities was exhibiting complete honesty and transparency with employees about the school’s condition, despite the fact much of what he was sharing was bad news. “I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but the school was on the brink of bankruptcy. A couple of bad decisions could have sunk it,” he later described. “I am not sure many employees really knew what was going on. This was in the day before we had PowerPoint, so I prepared a presentation using an overhead projector and walked all of the employees through our financial situation… I didn’t want to scare or alarm them, but they needed to know.”
While this was no doubt a blow to morale, it also helped to set a precedent of open and honest communication between the president, staff, and faculty which were absent at points in both the college’s recent and distant past. While this trust was good, it also became another heavy responsibility for Barnes. “It was almost scary what the board allowed me to do. There was seldom any pushback.” Barnes also established a tradition of holding a community meeting with all employees following every board meeting–a tradition which later presidents maintained.
Besides building trust and transparency among employees, Barnes’ other top priority coming into the presidency was enrollment. “When I became president, we had about 1,000 students attending classes in Marion and about 700 enrolled in our adult programs, which had begun two years earlier,” he said.
During this summer, the Department of Education and Ministry of the Wesleyan Church reported just twenty percent of Wesleyan students attended Wesleyan Colleges. This statistic was a shock to Barnes. Wesleyan students made up forty-five percent of Marion College’s undergraduate population, and as such he believed increasing Wesleyan enrollment would solve the school’s enrollment problems, at least in the short term.
During this first year, Barnes devoted two or three Sundays of every month to traveling and speaking at any Wesleyan church he could. This ranged from speaking for five minutes to leading entire services. This was just one part of his efforts, however, with the main plan consisting of three parts. First, he began the Wesleyan ministers scholarship program, providing a discount on tuition to children of all Wesleyan pastors. Second, Marion College began a church matching scholarship program with an even better variation of it which provided one year of free tuition to students who came to study for ministry. The third part of this plan was to build a new residence hall–Carmin–to give the appearance of growth and expansion at the school while also helping to house the influx of students they would bring in if this strategy was successful. Because the hall would take four years to build, whether the gamble would pay off was hard to tell at the time.
Another step Barnes took to turn the situation around during his first year was to hire a new head of giving and fundraising, with Terry Munday filling this role. At first, Munday declined due to the low salary and poor state of the school, but Barnes was undeterred and continued to ask. Eventually Munday came to visit the campus, and while still convinced the school was headed for bankruptcy, he later said he “began to see how much [Barnes] loved the institution,” and began to love it too. Munday agreed to join soon after, both able to see Barnes was serious about careful financial spending (one of his evening habits was to go around campus turning off lights left on in empty buildings to save the school money) and also knew how to bring money in, even if spending it was first required.
Although it received a good inspection on his first day, Barnes still began to visit some of the adult education classes to get an understanding of this newer aspect of the college. The initial inspection was useful in helping him focus on other areas for a time, but once he visited the classes himself, Barnes found the program was running so well he became committed to helping his predecessor’s legacy flourish. With his Sundays already full, Barnes began to use parts of weekdays to visit bank presidents, plant managers, and anyone else whose employees might exhibit any interest in an adult education program, helping to spread the word. After a few months of this, LEAP grew from the 700 students who were part of it at the beginning of the year to almost 1,800 students, and two new financial aid programs were introduced. This began to generate strong revenue for the school, but, wanting Marion College’s main campus to stand self-sufficient and not depend on LEAP, Barnes convinced the board to cut the campus off from LEAP funds in two years as a way of both setting expectations for himself and for others which would counteract any desire to coast off LEAP’s newfound success.
The final notable project which Barnes launched during his first year came in February of 1988, just seven months into his tenure, when the board approved his request to change Marion College’s name to Indiana Wesleyan University. By including the school’s Wesleyan nature in its name and moving it from a college to a university, the name change reoriented the ways in which the school was viewed.
This name change was announced in the Spring 1988 Triangle, with the seal and name change launching on July 1, at the start of the 1988-1989 academic year. While they were previously the Marion College Titans, the change in name resulted in the school’s teams becoming the Indiana Wesleyan Wildcats. To mark this change, a new mascot was introduced named Wesley Wildcat (later tweaked to Wesley the Wildcat).
By the end of this second school year, the number of Wesleyan students had doubled, LEAP students were pouring in at an even faster speed, and the school had undergone a complete change in identity. In just two years, Barnes’ administration took the financially unstable and increasingly small Marion College and transformed it into the thriving, growing Indiana Wesleyan University. Wanting to keep the momentum they developed, Barnes worked with the school to purchase 56 acres of nearby land to expand the campus and began to raze or move over two dozen buildings, with much of the land turning into well-landscaped greenery and other areas becoming the sites for new buildings. By the time Carmin Hall opened in the fall of 1990, every room was filled, Barnes’ multi-year gamble paying off at last.
During the 1990s, Barnes continued to help IWU grow as a university, adding new buildings, but the one project which remained outside of his reach was a seminary. While he created a committee to work on developing one, including general officers of the church, district superintendents, and faculty members, no agreement was ever reached on what the curriculum would include. When not as much funding from outside institutions arrived as anticipated, it became clear this area of growth for IWU would need to wait. Deciding to redirect his efforts, Barnes focused on creating a relationship with Wesley Biblical Seminary in Mississippi as an alternative. While there was talk of Wesley Biblical Seminary moving to Marion so it could closely partner with IWU, by 1995 these talks were in a stalled state.
In 1997, wanting to bring the university into its next stage of growth, Barnes introduced the strategic plan–an initiative focused on six priorities which would help the university to advance into the new millennium well. While he found success leading the university through this past decade, if it was going to continue to experience this same level of growth and health it would need to continue changing and adapting to the ever-changing educational, digital, and global landscape it was part of.
After twelve years in office, President Barnes spent much of 1999 reflecting on the past and pointing out the contributions of others. “Soon after I became president of Indiana Wesleyan University in 1987, cards and letters began to trickle into my office from students, parents, and alumni,” Barnes wrote in the Spring Triangle. “Most of the notes contained positive comments about campus life or a word of personal encouragement. There was an occasional brickbat, too, but we always welcome constructive criticism. There are no deaf ears at IWU. When the first cards and letters came, I placed them in a file drawer behind my desk. Over the last decade, I continued to add to the file. When I opened the drawer a few weeks ago, I realized that the cards and letters now take up nearly the entire drawer… Clearly one of the joys of being the president of IWU is hearing so many good comments about so many things that I personally had so little to do with. I am only one part of a much larger family that makes IWU everything that it is. The genuine care and concern that the entire IWU family demonstrates every day is simply incredible.”
In his next Presidential Report he also wrote, “A university can be no better than its people. In that regard, Indiana Wesleyan University truly is blessed… The Lord has assembled a remarkable group of people, and he’s done it in remarkable ways. And each person, regardless of rank or responsibility, is just as vital to fulfilling the mission of IWU as the next person.”
The turn of the millennium brought with it a four-year capital campaign with a goal of raising $48,000,000, with the first sixty percent already raised by the time the campaign was announced. This campaign’s goal was to divide all the funds among various areas on campus to improve the university overall. President Barnes also went on a trip to Greece with students and faculty this same year. Never one to shy away from international travel, trips like these allowed Barnes to connect with students and faculty in more personal and meaningful ways. The year 2000 also brought with it a new Lilly Endowment grant, won with President Barnes’ help, proving essential to the university’s future and general wellbeing.
Over the next few years the student center was revitalized, Goodman Library was replaced by the much larger and more central Jackson Library, with the former building becoming an academic hall for the still new John Wesley Honors College (the first class of which graduated in 2002), the concept of World Changers began to enter the IWU lexicon, and both The Triangle and other aspects of IWU’s media presence began to increasingly explore online avenues.
By 2003, IWU’s donors reached 5,800, and the previously announced capital campaign reached $55,200,000—a full $7,200,000 more than first hoped for. In many ways, these years served as a pivotal moment in IWU history which helped to redefine the university and ensured it would thrive.
Although Barnes’ responsibilities were rather serious and levity was not always an option, Secretary to the President Mary Allen Martin admitted “once in a while he’ll get so tickled, and when he does he just laughs all over… and you just can’t help but laugh.” Barnes was also known for breaking his general professional manner at Christmas to dress up as Santa Claus for community dinners.
When President Barnes decided to retire, he did so enthusiastically, thankful to have led the university so long and excited to see what God would do with his life and Indiana Wesleyan University in the years which were to follow. Barnes announced his departure on April 4, 2005, a year before he would leave, so both incumbent president Dr. Henry Smith and the university could adjust to the change.
Barnes was leaving the office of president after eighteen consecutive years of record enrollment and balanced budgets. He was responsible for helping secure more than $35,000,000 in grants, constructing four regional campuses in Indiana, three in Ohio, and one in Kentucky, beginning IWU’s online programs, launching the first doctoral program, beginning a summer conferencing program which brought over 20,000 people to IWU’s campus every summer, starting the John Wesley Honors College, and increasing salaries for all IWU employees. By the time he departed, the school had grown from 1,766 students to 12,632 and the campus’ landscape was considerably different, with many buildings torn down and just as many added.
Following his departure from the role of president, a role he held longer than anyone else save McConn, Barnes stepped into the position of IWU’s first chancellor on July 1, 2006. “Dr. Barnes will continue to work on select areas of advancement, be involved in new IWU strategic initiatives as opportunities develop and take on special projects assigned by the new president and the trustees,” then Chairman of the Board Dr. Lyle Reed explained at the time.
At the end of 2009, James Barnes departed the role of chancellor, his time in the position always planned to last for just three years. The Barnes family then moved to a home in Tennessee they built with the intention of it becoming their retirement home. Two years later, the student center was renamed to the Barnes Student Center in honor of both James and Tommie. Speaking at the dedication, then Chairman of the Board Carl Shepherd said, “We truly are blessed that the longest stop on the remarkable journey of Jim and Tommie Barnes was here at Indiana Wesleyan University. The life of this institution has been forever enriched by their faithful and untiring service.”
In the Spring 2002 issue of The Triangle, Barnes wrote, “While I remain committed to the growth and progress IWU has been blessed with in recent years, my personal strategic plan for IWU revolves around preserving and strengthening IWU’s historic and current mission. Although the words in the mission statement have been rearranged and revised over the years, the meaning is as old as the university itself… My resolve is that we will remain faithful to our historic mission, that IWU will continue to be a Christ-centered university providing a quality, biblically based education. My passion is focused on those things that must be done and monitored to ensure that the light of our Christian mission does not die at IWU but rather burns even more brightly.” Eighteen years after Barnes left the presidency, the light of IWU’s Christian mission burns as bright as ever, thanks in no small part to the decades of service Barnes gave the school.
