Introduction
The University of Virginia: the Casteen Years
In 1961 as a first-year student, John Thomas Casteen III stepped onto the storied lawn of Mr. Jefferson’s academical village. He was a boy from Portsmouth, Virginia, a crack student, who had learned well his public school teachers’ lessons about the history of the United States. On that first day of college, he knew where he was standing, although he was not quite sure where he would go from there.
By the 1960’s, the University of Virginia had seen many permutations since the days when it consisted only of Thomas Jefferson’s architectural and academic plans and a cornerstone laid by Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. In the antebellum University, professors and students comprised two small, fairly narrow groups made up in the first case by wealthy sons of the South, and in the second, by less wealthy intellectuals, at first from Europe, then from the United States. For many years following the Civil War, the University was considered an academic backwater of American Higher Education. Its serious and not-so-serious students would become mostly responsible citizens as Jefferson intended. However, in regard to his second intention, the advancement of knowledge, the University was not highly distinguished.
Although over the years, some have affectionately called it “the Harvard of the South.” Aspirations notwithstanding, the University of Virginia has never been quite that. Finances have always been a bit uncertain. Nor had the University fulfilled its founders’ ideals of democratic education until important changes in student demographics were achieved. In the sixties with the admission of African American men as undergraduates, then in the seventies with the admission of women as undergraduates, and continuing through the eighties, nineties, and tens with the ethnic and economic diversification of the University’s student body and faculty, the University has come much closer to the democratic ideals.
The democratization of the University of Virginia has come hand-in-hand with an evolution in the way the school has been financed. While Mr. Jefferson intended that the University be first among its peers in all academic areas, it certainly has become highly regarded in many scholarly disciplines in spite of vastly increased competition from the 20th century’s proliferation of American universities. It is likely that Mr. Jefferson, rectors of the Board of Visitors, chairs of the faculty, and the University’s seven presidents have understood that given a persistently limited commitment of budget support from the Commonwealth of Virginia, full success in this endeavor would not be possible. After all, to create, sustain, and advance a public university, most academic planners would expect that public money would be necessary, substantial, and continuing. Unfortunately and for many reasons, some of them good, the state has not been willing or able to give the University all that it needed for boosting the quality of its faculty and infrastructure.
Unfortunately, between 1990 and 2010 state support of the University of Virginia, became even more tenuous. In 1990, funds from the state made up almost 23 per cent of the University’s total budget. By 2010, the percentage of the budget supported by state funds had shriveled to 6 per cent. Because a university president’s job requires making silk purses out of sows’ ears, Mr. Casteen and his financial team took a hard look at University’s funding model, and together invented a new model that would both streamline financial procedures and give University administrators more autonomy in building the University’s resources and designing its budget. Still, in spite of Virginia’s failure to supply sufficient cash to build the University’s full teaching and research capacities, throughout these past two centuries, the University’s stewards, with striking resourcefulness, have built a world-class public university on land that once could not even support a good corn harvest.
During his presidential career at the University of Virginia, John Casteen provided a convincing response to the questions that he and his predecessors have grappled with: How is a public university to rely on private money and still fulfill its public purpose? Throughout the history of the UVA presidency--1903 to the present--answering this question has not been a mere academic exercise. Rather, finding a solution to the dilemma has been a matter of academic life and death.
A former champion debater, aware of the power of logical persuasion, Mr. Casteen explains the thinking behind the once paradoxical notion that the University of Virginia could become more authentically public by relinquishing some public support. He has said,
The logical deduction begins with the revision of the University’s relationship with the state by means of the Restructured Higher Education Financial and Administrative Operations Act of 2005, which gave the Board of Visitors more control over the University’s operations. As a result of this enhanced control, especially over the University’s income, we have been able to fund Access UVa that allows students, who without the tuition assistance that the program provides would not be able to afford a UVa education. It is fair to say, then, that the the Restructuring Act, while lessening the University’s dependence on public funding, has made the University more truly public.
When he announced his intention to retire, Mr. Casteen acknowledged that while he had hoped to be able to help the University of Virginia become the best public university in the world, as of summer of 2010 the ball rests short of the end zone. Still, observers will acknowledge that the University had advanced dramatically in the last twenty years. To detail these advancements, which are a record of Mr. Casteen’s achievements, Peggy Harrison and I offer this book. In it we tell the story of both the University and its seventh president during the fifty years between Mr. Casteen’s enrollment as a first-year student and his retirement as the University’s seventh president. It is the story of the dual purpose of Mr. Casteen’s work--the broadening of access to public higher education and the patient working-out of new funding models for the state’s colleges and universities that we have told in these pages. Fortunately for public higher education, Mr. Casteen’s goals became achievements, although, like everything in life, not easily. We take pains to recognize that neither achievement came without opposition and compromise and costs, vicissitudes that we also have faithfully tried to recount.
It is our notion that the life of John Casteen helps tell the story of the democratization of education in the United States. John T. Casteen III, born in Portsmouth, Virginia, the first in his family to go to college, ultimately became a champion of public access to higher education in a part of the world that values private rights over public goods, and charity over taxation. With discipline and ingenuity, he has gone a long way toward solving the puzzle of creating a system of public higher education without the full support of the state. It is apparent that the biography of a public university president, because of the nature of the presidency, covers just about all the academic, financial, and social issues that leaders of American public universities have faced since the University of Georgia was chartered in 1785 and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened its halls to students in 1789.
In short, the University of Virginia, which itself was chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1819, is the subject of this book. Its focus are the 49 years between 1961, when John Casteen became a first-year student at the University and 2010, when he ended his tenure as its president. Over the course of these years, the University of Virginia and its peers faced the explosion of knowledge and the simultaneous shrinking of tax bases and contracting of state budgets. Because of this congruence of experience, we believe that our narrative has relevance extending beyond the state of Virginia and beyond the career of John T. Casteen III.
To set the context for the story forward, Chapter One offers a digest of the basic history of the University of Virginia, 1817 to 1960. Following chapters, by telling the story of the personal education of Mr. Casteen--his early education in Portsmouth--Kindergarten through 12th Grade, and then at the University of Virginia--from his bachelor of arts through his doctoral studies--depict the situation of public education in Virgina at mid-century. In later chapters, by examining Mr. Casteen’s work as a professor, dean of admissions, secretary of education, and then president, we describe the way in which social forces and individual efforts transformed Virginia’s flagship university. Now at the end of an era, we offer the tale of fifty years during which Mr. Jefferson’s university became more truly itself.
On a personal note, both Peggy Harrison, a member of the College of Arts and Science Class of 1983, and I, with a 1991 Master’s degree from the College, have been employed by Mr. Casteen. When Peggy was a photographer for the Cavalier Daily and he was Secretary of Education, she took her first picture of John Casteen. And for the last 13 years, Peggy has photographed Mr. Casteen at both public and private events and has taken many of his official photographs, building a library of historical photographs, a number of which are reproduced in this book. As for me, I worked in Madison Hall as writer and assistant to President Casteen for six years. Peggy and I have been motivated to produce this book by our fascination with the history of the University of Virginia, and no less so by our admiration for President Casteen and the astonishing work he has done to advance the cause of American public education. We hope that The Casteen Years proves to be useful to scholars of education as well as to friends and alumni of the University of Virginia.
Margaret Klosko
Charlottesville, Virginia
August 1, 2011
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