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Most of the travelers arriving at Pittsburgh International Airport in the wee hours of a Sunday morning are lucky to be greeted with a cup of coffee and a taxicab.

But people coming in on the red-eye from San Francisco on June 20 got a big surprise --- they got a rousing welcome from the Penn State Nittany Lion and a group of staffers from the Greater Allegheny Campus in McKeesport.

That's because about two dozen of the passengers on this particular United Airlines flight were faculty members from Duy Tan University in Da Nang, Vietnam.

They're the first of about 100 Duy Tan business faculty who will be trained over the next four years by instructors from Greater Allegheny in Western-style methods of teaching.

For the next few weeks, they'll be living in McKeesport Hall --- the Greater Allegheny student dormitory --- and they'll take back the knowledge they gain to Da Nang, where they'll in turn help train their colleagues.

Last Tuesday, the campus and invited dignitaries welcomed this group of Vietnamese visitors to McKeesport with a special reception in Penn State's Student Community Center.

The international link-up between McKeesport and Da Nang sprang from a February 2009 trade mission to Vietnam by a group of business leaders from Western Pennsylvania.

Kurt Torell, director of academic affairs for Penn State Greater Allegheny, represented the higher education community on that trip.

Roger Granville, president of GlobalPittsburgh, says Torell served as a sort of informal ambassador or "citizen diplomat."

Among the special guests at last week's reception was the Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Le Cong Phung.

Phung says the Penn State Greater Allegheny partnership is one of many that Vietnam is pursuing with American universities in an attempt to modernize its higher education system.

But Phung says the partnership between Penn State Greater Allegheny and Duy Tan University is more than a training program --- it's also fostering a productive and internationally important relationship between the United States and Vietnam.

Phung points out that although it's only been 15 years since the United States normalized relations with Vietnam, much progress has been made in that short period of time.

The Duy Tan visitors will get help during their stay in Western Pennsylvania from Vietnamese Americans and from the group "Friends of Da Nang," a Pittsburgh-area charity that includes many veterans of the Vietnam War.

Expenses for the Duy Tan linkup are being paid for by the Vietnamese government, and all of the faculty members selected for the program are fluent English speakers. But one visitor to McKeesport --- Duy Tan University's Vice Rector, Le Nguyen Bao --- addressed the reception in Vietnamese, so that the local community could hear him express his gratitude in his native language.

Beginning this fall, faculty from Penn State Greater Allegheny will begin traveling to Da Nang for at least two weeks each semester to model and monitor the training of Duy Tan's instructors.

Penn State Greater Allegheny Chancellor Curtiss Porter went to Vietnam in January, along with Torell, to sign the agreement with Duy Tan. He says the McKeesport campus is the first of the university's 19 branches to partner with an international institution, but is unlikely to be the last.

Porter says he's also hoping it blazes a trail for more cooperation between Vietnam and the Mon-Yough area. That connection, Porter says, could provide economic development and cultural exchange opportunities for many years to come.