April 15, 2025
Good afternoon, and welcome to this memorial service to honor a great president, a great person, and a great friend—President Emeritus John Casteen. I would like to thank the Casteen family for inviting me to say a few words, and I would also like to offer my deepest condolences.
John led a full, rich life. I cannot do justice to every facet of it, and thankfully there are additional, amazing speakers who will together fill out the portrait of his life. So I will limit my comments largely to his time as president and to our friendship, which I cherished.
This will sound odd, I realize, but when I think about John, I think about doors.
Not the rock band, but actual and metaphorical doors. The doors John opened, the doors John knocked on, and the doors John built.
I think first of how John gently encouraged me to consider walking through the doors of Madison Hall to become president of UVA. I didn’t know John while he was president, and I was a law professor. I nonetheless reached out to speak to him when I was considering whether to take this job. I confessed that I was worried that I was not suited to be president of UVA and also worried that I would not enjoy the job. In retrospect, I realize there was little cause to worry about the latter. I mean: What’s not to love about being a college president these days?
In any event, when I called John, he and Betsy were at their place in Maine, and what I expected to be a 30-minute call turned into a 2-hour conversation. He shared stories; he gave me great advice; and he promised he would be more than happy to continue the conversation—which we did over the next 7 years, including our last visit, when I went to see him in the hospital a couple of weeks before he passed away.
In the first conversation and in all the ones that followed, John conveyed, directly and indirectly, that being president of the University of Virginia was a worthy endeavor. It was clear to me that for John it was and remained the honor and privilege of a lifetime.
John served as president from 1990-2010. Only Edwin Alderman served longer. To say John accomplished a great deal during this time is true but also a gross understatement. He helped build the financial, physical, and intellectual foundation on which the present version of UVA rests.
At the start of his tenure, the University faced nearly existential funding cuts from Richmond with reductions in state support of 20 percent. Along with colleagues like Leonard Sandridge and Colette Sheehy, he adopted the view that public universities needed a measure of financial and operational autonomy that would enable them to continue to thrive, even when the state faced budgetary constraints. He worked tirelessly in Richmond to achieve this and eventually saw his ideas translated into legislation. His work helped not just UVA but the entire system of higher education in Virginia, which became one of, if not the, best in the nation.
John did not stop there. Another part of the formula for achieving financial autonomy for the University was attracting private philanthropy, and John’s fundraising prowess was unmatched. He was not afraid to knock on doors, and he knocked on a lot of them. With the help of enormously dedicated volunteers and generous donors, John led not one, but two successful capital campaigns.
To give a sense of just how successful they were: In 1990, the market value of the endowment was $488 million. By 2007, it was $5.1 billion, an amazing feat for any college, but especially a public university. This required enormous personal sacrifice, including a great deal of travel. But through these efforts, John helped to create something innovative and enduring—a public university atop a strong privately funded endowment.
To John, these financial successes were much more than operational or tactical. Financial security was connected both to the founding of the University and to its ongoing mission. As he wrote:
"This campaign’s purpose is to ensure that excellence thrives in public higher education, and specifically in this place where the concept of knowledge as the foundation for human freedom first took root in our hemisphere. Through this effort, we will generate, for our era and the next, that useful knowledge that matters most to our culture and our economy. We will focus on our most important product: women and men of uncommon achievement; honorable, responsible, intellectually powerful, and broadly knowledgeable citizens ready for effective engagement in public life—for the power and happiness that Jefferson saw as the benefits bestowed by the mastery of useful knowledge."
In addition to knocking on a lot of doors, and in part as a result of all that knocking, John was also able to build quite a few doors—doors in the many buildings added to UVA during his tenure. On his watch, UVA took the shape of the UVA we know today. Former UVA Rector Heywood Fralin called John, quite deservedly, “the father of our modern university.” John envisioned a modern Grounds with an expanded physical infrastructure that, at its core, provided resources for both the student experience and leading scholarship across a wide range of disciplines.
From Education to Engineering, the Arts to Architecture, McIntire to medical research and nursing, and JPJ to Klockner, UVA renovated, built, or purchased more than 130 buildings under John’s leadership. He grew the overall square footage of the University by 42 percent. The South Lawn Phase I Project itself added over 100,000 square feet of academic space. And perhaps most meaningfully to John, a lover of books, he grew the Library: he dramatically increased its holdings and built new space for the Harrison Institute and the Small Special Collections Library.
At the same time, John, ever the visionary, also foresaw the digital revolution. He became an early and strong supporter of digital scholarship and supported initiatives like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
In short, it is hard to look around UVA today and not see something connected to John’s presidency.
As I have described, John knocked on doors and built them, but in my view he will be best remembered for opening doors for others.
When John and I spoke on the phone for the first time, we discovered we were both first-generation college students. Both of us had teachers and mentors who believed in us, and a college education that changed the course of our lives. Others had opened the door to education and opportunity for us, and we shared a sense of responsibility to open doors for others. As Leonard Sandridge, who worked with John for 20 years, said about John: “He had an appreciation of what education could do for you, and he demonstrated that for himself. Therefore, he wanted to make sure he did everything he could to make it available to everyone else.”
And so he did.
In 1975, John became Dean of Admissions at UVA. President Edgar Shannon had recently led the efforts to co-educate UVA, and John saw it as his responsibility to implement that vision. As his children would later write in his obituary, “having come of age during the Civil Rights era and attended high school during Massive Resistance, he was determined to transform the undergraduate student body in a manner consistent with the principle and practice of inclusive excellence. He foresaw the ideal that all students should be equally served by an institution devoted to the public good.”
This work continued during his presidency. Together with the Board of Visitors, he created AccessUVa, a financial aid program that made UVA affordable for all, and one that continues to make UVA one of only two public universities to meet 100 percent of undergraduate students’ demonstrated financial need.
John opened doors to students from underrepresented populations and increased their enrollment significantly. He quadrupled the number of international students on Grounds and dramatically increased study-abroad programs. Women and African-Americans grew their ranks among faculty, and Charlottesville became an attractive destination for scholars from around the world. John Casteen made UVA into a place that attracted talented and diverse students and faculty from across the Commonwealth and beyond, and in so doing strengthened the university and raised its profile on the world stage.
He opened doors in other ways, too. John’s portrait, as you can see, places him at the front door of Carr’s Hill. Each year, he, and very often members of his family, would host innumerable events and greet thousands of visitors. John would greet each of those visitors at the open front doors. He knew that talking with people, face to face, and welcoming them to the University, set the tone for a place that was accessible and caring even as it maintained the highest levels of excellence and ambition.
One of my fondest memories as president was returning the favor and welcoming John back for a private lunch at Carr’s Hill, shortly after the renovations were complete. I must have heard from a dozen people that I had better be waiting for John at the front door when he arrived. Over a long lunch, John shared story after story of his time living in Carr’s Hill, a place he genuinely loved, as did Betsy. In our conversation, John managed to convey, as he always did, that being a part of this university—and being able to lead it—was a rare gift and a privilege, and that the community here was doing something special and something important. Something worthy, I think he was trying to tell me, of your very best efforts.
But you do not need to take my word for it.
Upon leaving the presidency in 2010, John offered these words that are more relevant now than ever. “I hope that what survives,” he said of his legacy, “is the conception of the University as a place that really does belong to the people, as a place where excellence is pursued because it makes people free, as a place that is able to confront its weaknesses and find ways to remedy them, and finally as a place that is capable of large ambitions, and makes no apology for being ambitious.”
John made UVA a place of large ambitions, and we are all the better because of it. I am enormously grateful to have known him and to have benefited from his wisdom and friendship. He will be deeply missed but forever remembered at UVA.