Episode Transcript

Jay Lemons:

Hello and thank you for listening, I’m Jay Lemons. Welcome to Leaders on Leadership, brought to you by Academic Search, and the American Academic Leadership Institute. The purpose of our podcast is to share the stories of the people and the forces that have shaped leaders in higher ed, and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the Academy. I’m delighted today to be joined by John Casteen. John is the President of the University of Virginia, where he’s served as the seventh President from 1990 to 2010. John previously served as Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and was President of the University of Connecticut from 1985 to 1990. He’s been a board member and a leader of countless higher ed organizations, and has been a director for the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards, on and on and on, on service to many, many higher ed associations.

He’s also the chair of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, among other things. After his Presidency, John continued to serve as a university professor until his retirement this past December, 2020. He holds all three of his academic degrees in English, from the University of Virginia. It’s a special personal pleasure for me to have John as a guest here, as my wife Marsha and I had the privilege and honor of serving as members of the President’s office staff at the University of Virginia during his early years in Charlottesville, and I continued to work for John as the chancellor of the university’s only branch campus, the College at Wise, for another eight and a half years. Indeed, John Casteen was my boss, is my mentor, my friend, and has been a great champion throughout my adult life. John, thank you for joining us and welcome.

John Casteen:

Thank you for including me.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I’m going to dive right in here. I mean, I’m half tempted to go off script, I’m reading that you were the seventh President of the University of Virginia, reminds me of a couple of remarkable things. Number one, UVA did not have a President until Edwin Alderman came in 1907, as I recall. And there probably are still people who think that was a better system, to work by faculty committee than having a President. But I remember your first meeting was Senator John Warner, who quipped to you, “John, you and I have a lot in common. John, you’re the seventh President of the University of Virginia, and I was the seventh husband of Elizabeth Taylor.” I don’t know why that one stays with me 30 years later.

John Casteen:

It’s a great line, and that is in fact what he said.

Jay Lemons:

This is going to be a long episode here, I can already tell. Well, one of the goals that we have for the program is to really invite and ask people to reflect, and consider their own pathways with a hope that some of your own journey will be an inspiration for others. And John, I of course know some of your story, but I would love for you to share with your listeners some of the people, the events, and the opportunities that forged you to become the person and extraordinary leader you became in your journey in higher education.

John Casteen:

Yeah, I thought about this a little bit Jay, and I do have a couple of cases to talk about I guess. One person who was very important in the way I came to think about becoming a university President, and then later to think about being a university President, was the late Henry Winkler, who was the Provost at Rutgers, and was the President at the University of Cincinnati, he was an alumnus. Henry was a historian, he is the author of a number of standard books having to do with the American Republic and its formation, but also he worked with his son late in his life on some collaborative work. Striking kind of intellect, a man who fought very broadly, who had focused on the nature of leadership in times before that became an academic study topic.

John Casteen:

Henry I knew initially because I was a member of the Board of Trustees of the College Examination Board in the late ’70s, in the early ’80s. Eventually I chaired it, and followed after Henry in some work that he’d done there. I was struck by how broadly sympathetic he was with the people who worked around him, by the way in which he focused on work as the common denominator within the academic community. He was an enabler, he understood what was required to help individual persons become their best. At one time, I’ll tell a story on Jay, if you’ll forgive me. At one time, Jay had taken over a chaotic situation, and needed, I thought, a mentor to help him work it out. It was not a decision of his making at all, he’d gone to try to resolve things.

And Henry, when Jay first went to the college at Wise, put a tremendous amount of thought and I guess sympathy, Jay, into the work that Jay was doing. And if my memory is right, he became a member of the college’s board, the advisory entity, Jay. Committed himself to the institution because he had a sort of a deep grasp of what the chancellor was all about. I liked the fact that he was intellectually engaged, as well as emotionally engaged. I admired the way in which he understood that his role as President at Cincinnati was not to rebuild the university, or to replace it with something else that he imagined, but instead to build an institution on its own foundations over, and over, and over. He was interested in the urban role of that university.

He was focused on what it took to serve an evolving urban region from a university that was itself engaged in becoming something else. So, that’s the kind of person Jay, whom I have admired and understood. I was the Admissions Dean at UVA in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and worked with a woman named Jean Rayburn, who’s another one I would mention. Jean, sad to tell, died young, she was in fact herself the Dean for a time after I left to do something else. But Jean was enabling in the odd reason that she didn’t suffer fools gladly, and it wasn’t so much that, let’s call the person she labeled fools, let’s call them that. It wasn’t so much that she said, “You are this or that,” as that she herself registered inside, the net results of the judgments that she was making in the course of working with other people.

And then in sort of the quiet of our offices, after the front door was closed, we would hear her commentary on the day. She had an extraordinary range of experience, and little or no self-importance. She saw herself as a leader who was first and foremost a servant of the institution, that grasp of leadership became also a topic of academic study after, after Jean’s time. But I found every day with her instructive, she knew the value of time off, she had a knack for defusing bad situations. Different kind of intellect entirely from Henry Winkler’s, but similar to Henry’s, in that she was tremendously engaged intellectually with the work she was doing, with the people she was serving. And she had aspirations that were built on what she was doing intellectually from minute to minute.

She would work with students, and imagine them 20 years later, and she was a lifelong advisor to many who, like me, eventually mourned her early death. So, there’s another kind of person. And then finally, I was Virginia’s Education Secretary during a period when the two party system in the modern sense was just evolving. And I worked with a couple of really extraordinary legislative leaders, one was a Quaker woman from an area in Northern Virginia that had a history of Quaker settlement, that’s still a Quaker region. And the other was an urban politician representing the area that became eventually the modern Northern Virginia complex, and I was always struck by the way in which those two could find common ground.

The two of them could define purposes for government that were more than political, and yet both of them understood instinctively that the kind of government you see in a state capital, or in the US capital, is ultimately a political process, that people are constantly negotiating partial settlements, negotiating some way to move the case down the road a bit, and then to pick it up again later on. Those are examples, Jay, but they’re people whose work I watched closely. The governor I worked for, Chuck Robb, had the same kind of influence on me, because I wasn’t inside his mind as he made his decisions. But I was able to watch to understand from step to step what he was doing, and why. Actually, he’s just published his memoirs, a book called In The Arena.

And that book, which I have not read, but from the reports of it, that book appears to be about his realization that once one puts oneself into the public space, one stays there, that it’s all but impossible to be in and then out. Or worse yet, in, out, in. He saw it as a lifelong commitment, and he lived the commitment. As also his wife, who was President Johnson’s daughter, Lynda. Extraordinary people who realized that they had given up something of themselves in order to be what they are as public people. Presidents, Deans, others in leadership positions within our institutions are ultimately public people, and there are both benefits and prices for that. But in any event, it’s a reality that one needs to know if one is going to be a President or a Provost or a Dean, or whatever.

Jay Lemons:

Who are the legislators that you mentioned earlier?

John Casteen:

Well, one was Abe Brault. Abe was one of the people who shaped Northern Virginia as a distinctive region. Last I heard, I hope he’s still alive and well, but last I heard he was in Florida, I think, and retired. He had a knack for communicating experience in a way that was useful. The woman was Dorothy McDermott, Dorothy was a Louden County Quaker, as was her husband, Mac. And the two of them were a team that functioned without any player straying into the other player’s space. Dorothy was gracious, she was a natural leader, but not one who gave any impression of having sought it, and yet she had run for office repeatedly. She had a kind of moral compass that made her a sort of still point in the middle of the chaos that goes on in the legislature, as the entity settles down and gets ready to work. They were, she and Mac, were… They were great spirits, and great intellects.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for sharing, and I-

John Casteen:

Very unusual, Jay. You don’t find many… I haven’t found many elected public leaders who had Dorothy’s temperament, it’s part of why one remembers Dorothy.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, yeah, wow. And where you started. Thank you for celebrating, and remembering Henry, and what a great influence he came to be on me. We didn’t call it coaching, but I’ll never forget your saying to me, “I know there’s some complicated issues to confront, and I’m going to help you sort of work them out I think. But, I think you may need somebody to talk to from time to time,” and it’s a reminder for me, one of the things that I’m trying to encourage is, and I’ve not connected it to my own experience until this moment, John. But, how important coaching can be, especially for people new to leadership, or new in leadership roles, and that’s exactly what Henry was for me, and for us. And he did come to be invested in that place in a way that lived far beyond the eight and a half years that we spent there.

And yet he and Bee, just extraordinary people, a wonderful story. And it makes me think that I’d like to find a way to put this podcast in the hands of his children, Alan and Karen, who I think would delight in our reflecting and remembering their dad. Wonderful, wonderful guy. John, you’ve been at the forefront of the civil rights movement throughout the most of your life, if not the whole of it. I would wish it would be valuable for you in this moment where it feels like we’ve got a lot more journey ahead of us than we have behind us to reflect on the role that higher ed should play in making this that more perfect union that our founders imagined.

John Casteen:

Yeah, to come at that topic, Jay, I need to explain one thing about my own background. I grew up in the eastern part of Virginia, in a city, [inaudible 00:17:06], which is a minor place. But it is the site of one of the… Well, the most significant American ship [inaudible 00:17:16]. It’s a place of people who, in wartime built ships and similar things, in peacetime maintained them. That area was, as candidly, all [inaudible 00:17:33], rocked by the political movement that was called massive resistance, an organized attempt at the top of Virginia politics to prevent integration of Virginia’s schools, even to the extent of closing schools whose local school boards voted lawfully, I should say, but voted to de-segregate the schools.

When I was a teenager the first couple of years of high school in particular, we could not understand why neighboring schools, schools that were rivals of mine, were closed. We had some of the most extraordinary people come as temporary students. The state’s position was that students who were displaced by the closure of schools in one region could not lawfully be enrolled in other public schools, they were trying to freeze the children in place without schooling. It was shocking. And I remember meeting a pair of twins, I’ve lost their names now, two girls, identical twins. Who would sit in an area where I sat, my principal had admitted these children without the authority to do it. They would sit where I sat in the classroom and explain to me, and others who would listen, what was going on.

And they got it, they understood that the purpose was to deny education itself to people who were not complacent in this time. So, I grew up with a… And I should say also, I heard this in another form at home, at night at the dinner table, my parents were scandalized, they saw no defense at all for what the state was doing. I heard other people who said the state leaders were right, and so on. It was complicated as I grew up, because in other areas of public activity I was working with people who had been leaders on the wrong side of that issue. And some of them were at various times very kind and good to me, and yet there was this festering wound that seemed not to have a solution. The solution that I saw, beginning with my realization that there really weren’t…

The public schools had begun to de-segregate, none of them had fixed it, but had begun. When I started college in 1961, there were two African American students in my class, there’d been one in the class before me, and that was it.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

John Casteen:

And I had various engagements with the ongoing scars from massive resistance. Had a girlfriend who was in college, in Farmville, which was one of the areas where the local governments refused to reopen their schools, and where schools were closed for a number of years at that time. With African American children taught in the Sunday school annexes of a couple of the churches, and Caucasian children rolling what was called in those days the corrugated academy. That particular one became a pretty good regional prep school, but in the early years they were simply ways to try to keep white children enrolled in schools that were themselves racially segregated. Then in the late ’60s, I was sort of plucked out of my graduate school teaching assignments to become an Assistant Dean in the college.

I had a faculty friend who was such a Dean, and they needed someone suddenly after some vacancy developed. And the Dean, who was a very cagey old guy, this is Irby Cauthen, and Irby would not like my calling him an old guy, but he was an older man to me. Irby from time to time talked to me about these things, including his vision that things really had to change, that the segregation of the Academy was ultimately a destructive force in the larger institution of government and of the state’s culture and so on. I began to understand that this affected the quality of learning for the students I was dealing, I saw very, very few minority students when I was Assistant Dean. But I realized that… And this place was also, by the way, in those days a single sex institution, basically.

There is a cost to those who do enroll, of having a sterile academy where you don’t have a mixture of ethnicities, and national origins, and races, and so on. But there’s another in what was in those days the almost sacred tradition of single-sex education, in a number of national institutions. It wasn’t just UVA and earlier UNC and so on, it was Harvard, and Yale, and Princeton, and so on. An absolutely foolish way to educate. And I became increasingly outraged about the separatism. I was given the job of advising two women, initially, who’d been admitted as experiments to see whether women could deal in the rarefied atmosphere of this boys’ school. So I met the two women, brilliant, focused, didn’t need me.

They knew what they wanted to take, all they needed was my signature on the card. And I remember thinking, “This is probably a share of what this place had been missing.” I eventually came back as a visiting professor to Virginia, and went into the classroom the first day I was teaching whatever I was doing, and noticed that all the students were sitting towards the front, except for a group of boys in the back. In those days, people came to class with coffee, a newspaper, and a cigarette pipe, and they sat in the back and they smoked and drank their coffee, and read the paper. There were a few back there who did that, they were the ones whose best hope was to make a C minus. But, the front half was participatory, and by that time the co-education was advance [inaudible 00:24:53].

By that time the student body was beginning to look like what I’d experienced in California. They were competitive, they were eager, they were fascinated, or they were horrified, or whatever else appropriate or possible in response to the material. Very different intellectual climate from what I had known as a student, from what the men in the back of the room were knowing at that time. Rolling forward somewhat, the then-President, Frank Hereford, asked me to leave Berkeley, and to come back to Virginia to be the Admissions Dean. And I hadn’t really put all this stuff together, but I got to… He said to me, “Look, this is where you build the university. If you don’t like what it is, this is the place to build it from the bottom up.”

And he proceeded to tell me about the need for diversity, about the value of access that is open to persons who achieve the academic standard, and so on. It was a 30 minute lesson, and admission of a great university. And he said, “We’re not there, and you can make this contribution to bringing us there.” By that time I’d begun to see racial separations in higher education, and gender separations as matters of equity, political ownership of what we now call in a broader sense civil rights. And I guess that in a sense I’d probably, by that time, been radicalized with regard to the function of higher education, and building a population.

But in any event, in company with Jean Rayburn, whom I mentioned, and a fellow named Jack Blackburn who also Dean [inaudible 00:27:02], really felt sort of a mission from God. We were going to do something substantial, we were going to change this place one integer at a time. I think all of us became increasingly unhappy with old ways of doing and being, and all of us came to believe that a great university constantly evolves from its bottom up, that the world of learning is not an ivory tower, it’s something quite different. And, that discovery, which I made family by family as I sat with the parents of African American students and tried to persuade them, “Look at us, or look at Virginia Tech, or the University of Richmond, or at William & Mary, whatever might be of interest.

“But don’t look only at the box into which our culture placed this young person at birth. Let’s build on the parents’ own determination for their children, and give young learners the broadest possible choice of places to go and to do that.” Got involved with the complexities of the financial aid system in those days, because our country was very backward. I was working on a couple of projects involving education in the UK, and realized the constraints that I was hearing night after night in college nights, in borough county high schools and so on, didn’t exist in other countries, that our national government has simply not lived up to its responsibility, and the states were if anything even worse. I began to realize the value of, I guess that’s it, practitioner reports to the public in the form of op ed pieces and so on.

I started writing as I thought of something that seemed to be appropriate to change things. And when I became Education Secretary in Virginia, I was working for a governor who had a tremendous vision of change, and who accomplished some tremendous things as governor. But one of the things that I remember is he was focused on what he saw, and I saw by this time, as a disadvantage enforced on children if their schools did not offer and, I came to believe require, academically rigorous programs for all students. Students who miss Algebra One, by probably ninth grade in those days, had no hope whatsoever of going to a highly selective college. Students who missed it by the eighth grade had no hope of becoming engineers, because the sequencing of courses, the things that came after Algebra One, to use that instance, that sequencing was not open to children whose schools had failed to push them in the direction of their optimal performance.

As Secretary of Education, I worked on a general overhaul of the curriculum that we were offering in our schools. I didn’t realize at the time that those are problems you have to solve every day. I thought, “Okay, we’ll do this, and then we’ll move onto something else.” That’s not how it works. The constant re-norming of curriculum that you expect to serve the broadest possible population, the constant index and achievement against what people do in other places, other states, other nations, the constant attention to the rights of minority children, of women who may be caught in the tyranny of a system where the most prestigious institutions serve primarily males. Less a reality now, but 50 years ago this was the way it was.

There’s a sense in which I guess what I learned in those years in state politics was you have to fight these tyrannies every day, and you have to do it by way of an affirmative alternative to the tyranny, that displaces the tyranny and opens up opportunity. Now, as to why that made me a political liberal, or why that made me an advocate of civil rights, and most people don’t see civil rights in the issues. I did it because you see the cases where you fail, you sit with a student who’s not going to do whatever would be the optimal thing for that student. And you learn over time that your job as a teacher, or as a Dean, or whatever, involves constantly opening up the door that’s closed to the student who’s in front of you, and preparing to open it for the next one also.

In a way, co-education was too easy. It seems like Never Never Land, I think, to young people looking at the system now. Not imagining what used to be the case with regard to the educational rights of women, but and you know, I’m still around, and I’m here to tell you it’s the way it was. African American students, Asian students, Asian American students.

Jay Lemons:

Jewish students?

John Casteen:

Jewish students.

Jay Lemons:

You’ve been a tireless champion, and I want to thank you, and applaud your courage. Because I bore personal witness to it repeatedly, but I’m really… A great takeaway from this is that it’s never once and done.

John Casteen:

It’s not. And you also have to let good fight. I didn’t have that many enemies because of the positions I was taking, because of the actions I was trying to develop, but there were some. And there were certainly people who thought that educational equity was insanity, that the notion of a civil system that worked properly and appropriately for African American, or Hispanic American, or other students, that that was a daydream, or something silly. There were even people who saw that as a threat, who imagined that the American cake was of a finite and fixed size, when in fact the opening of opportunity opens it up infinitely all around, and on into the future. We don’t live in a finite sum culture.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, yeah. Well, finally I appreciated your invoking the word radicalization. In part because, for all the clay feet of our founders, and of Mr. Jefferson, he was pretty radical in his beliefs about the benefits of the general diffusion of knowledge. And so, walking in your shadow, being in that place, certainly had a huge impact on me and my own thinking, and I, again, thank you for what you’ve done. Let’s switch gears here, and I’d like to have you spend a minute or two just talking about what makes a good leader. And let me clarify, I mean, good in the sense of virtuous, effective and successful, not grade B.

John Casteen:

I think part of it is the capacity to live with one’s own self-criticisms, to see one’s weaknesses or failings for what they are, and to determine to move on. Not regardless, because you work always to remedy what you see as flawed in yourself. I think a good leader in our system inevitably is one who is able to imagine and expect, ultimately, the best in others. I don’t know a flawless rule for choosing people to become part of the team, I think there’s a lot of hit or miss judgment in that. I have to confess that I have thought it was important to make one’s own decisions and not simply stand behind a process that might say that somebody else chose this person. I, at some point early on, came to believe that displacing all who were there before was not a good idea. That the human cost was very high, the institutional cost was higher.

Jay Lemons:

Well in fact, your arrival, and you were certainly at the mid point in… You were a fully-formed, highly accomplished professional when you returned to the university in 1990. But, I’ll never forget your very first personnel move, which was essentially to renew your colleagueship with Leonard Sanders. And, that was not about sweeping clean, that was about fortifying and unleashing the extraordinary potential that Leonard exercised over the balance of the career that you both shared.

John Casteen:

Yeah, Leonard was the Chief Financial Officer, and then we evolved in the direction of the Chief Operating Officer structure. Did it, frankly, because we needed skills and values and whatnot that I have not lived long enough to develop, and never would. And I was concerned about judgments made by a single mind, when in fact there ought to be multiple participants in major decisions. Leonard had a similar commitment to mine with regard to the equity rights of women, of members of racial minorities, and so on within the university. I didn’t, I still don’t see an alternative to that. The alternative I once heard as the me first school of government. I think the alternative’s just not tolerable, not imaginable in our culture.

And that the openness to qualities of others that we value, that we value the most in running the university, I think current leaders do also. But that openness of opportunity and equitable distribution of the capacity [inaudible 00:39:54], that Leonard was a very important part of that. The way he organized as an incoming President, I think ought to evolve and not be a pre-conceived pattern when you come in. I think it takes a little bit of time to make some sort of early judgment of the people, and the structures around you if you’re the new President. I did, when I first came back to Charlottesville, I contracted with a very fine consulting firm in New York, for some help in organizing the central administration functions.

I don’t know that the help itself changed the functions, but it did empower the people. People turned the consulting exercise into a kind of graduate short course in how to be the central administrative part of a university. I was brought in by people who wanted a more executive and a less administrative approach to running the university. That made sense to me at the time. Over the course of the 20 years here at UVA, my grasp of that changed as people came and went, as we attempted various times administrative arrangements. I’ve been struck since leaving the position of President by the number of ways in which changes that I would have thought would be permanent, durable things turned out to last only a couple of years after I was done.

We had a real sense of mission with regard to the American University as a player, and international university arrangements. And I learned a great deal in sort of the middle years when I was President, by getting to know people like the extraordinarily talented Principal he was called in those days, of the University of Edinburgh. Similarly, a couple of the universities in Hong Kong, one in Singapore, places with remarkably similar and yet remarkably different missions. The connections that… The points of contact that let others and I… Let us learn what we did from those entities, or people, they all seemed to collapse very quickly after I finished, I don’t know why.

Jay Lemons:

Interesting.

John Casteen:

I never heard a conversation about it, I never heard anything to say that it was a good or a bad decision to back away. But the institution did, so… And the month before I left the Presidency, I’d have said this is a permanent characteristic of the place, it wasn’t.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. You know John, one of the things that I remember you saying to me a long time ago, and it was in a way about the sort of potential isolation or loneliness of leadership. And I think I phrased the question something along the lines of, we feel like we’re friendly with lots of people, but we’re not sure who we’re friends with. And you gave me a gift, and it was also deeply meaningful at a personal level. You talked about the members of your team being extensions of your family, and it’s sort of contrarian leadership advice in a way. Maybe say a word or two about that?

John Casteen:

Well, I’m not sure that I have a structured response to that, Jay. It seems to me that one has to acknowledge the degree of mutual interdependence that exists within the President’s office, and between the President and the closest other leaders. When that’s not there, the rest of it doesn’t work.

Jay Lemons:

That’s right.

John Casteen:

And there are plenty of people who are superb bosses, and not so great at being a tier below the boss, or two tiers below the boss. You have to recognize that the relationships that support you, or sustain you, include I would say at best, deep measure of personal attachment. But that on the other hand, individual persons have their own careers and their own futures to think about.

Jay Lemons:

It also never impeded your holding us accountable.

John Casteen:

No, no. On the other hand Jay, I think I differ from colleagues whose work I respect tremendously, in that I never found any special usefulness in things like 360 degree evaluations and so on. The ultimate decisions had to do with results attained, and with the degree to which mutual confidences, each one believing in the other, exist. I think I must have wasted a couple of years in the course of my time as President, sitting through 360 sessions without ever believing I amounted to anything. I’m not an expert on many things of that sort, so I won’t pretend that. But, I didn’t see the practical value of it.

Jay Lemons:

You know, that, I hear you. And yet, I’ll go back to one of the things that you engaged, and this is probably your five, six or seven, somewhere deep into my time into my time in Wise, you asked Henry to come, and to help engage in some conversations in a way that really was a 360. And we didn’t use that language then, probably, but in the hands of a measured, wise person, it was really constructive feedback that was delivered to me by someone who I valued, and I trusted, and we all benefit from loving critics. Hey, listen, I want to move us into a lightning round. You’ve been so generous with your time, and we’ll find another occasion to prod and push you a little bit. But, let’s go to this lightning round. Who’s most influenced you, John?

John Casteen:

This is not rocket science, my mother.

Jay Lemons:

I was hoping very much that you’d say that, just haven’t had the privilege of knowing her and seeing that influence.

John Casteen:

Yeah, she was a person with the highest imaginable standards for herself, and for her offspring. But, with a broad capacity for tolerating human strengths and weaknesses where they occur. She was, I use the word radicalized earlier on this conversation, if there was a single radical influence with regard to my view of what was basic and fundamental about the American experience, it was she. No sympathy at all with people who would constrict or take away the rights of any person in these United States. A great believer in America, but a great critic of America’s leaders, most of the time when I was growing up. Very sympathetic parent, and on the other hand she withheld her judgments. When she was in her final illness, she said to me one day that she had been thinking about me and had decided that I was probably okay. I thought, “Wow, we’ve turned a corner here.”

Jay Lemons:

I’m sure there was a curl in her smile at that moment, Tom.

John Casteen:

[crosstalk 00:50:04].

Jay Lemons:

What book has most influenced you?

John Casteen:

Wow.

Jay Lemons:

A person with a great love of book-

John Casteen:

Yeah, I’m thinking. Probably a group of four or five of William Faulkner’s books, where he writes through the kinds of issues you and I have been discussing here, in the great books of the late ’20s. For totally different reasons, probably Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for the way in which he provides a kind of encyclopedia of human temperaments and so on. And for the ironic ways in which he deals with pomposity, and fundamental corruption and so on.

Jay Lemons:

I was thinking Beowulf was going to be in here somewhere.

John Casteen:

Yes and no. The complexity of that poem is such that I’ve learned to be a little bit cautious about explaining how it works in my own experience, because most people read translations, even good ones, the ones in Norse anthologies for example, and have a completely different grasp of what’s going on there from what I do. An extraordinary 13th Century Icelandic saga, which is the Saga of the People of the Laxardal, which is the valley of the Salmon River in the northwestern corner of Iceland. On a certain day for no reason anybody understands, a person, evidence says it was a woman, sat down in a place where nothing like a saga had ever been written, and proceeded to start writing one. And in a culture that appears to be male-dominated and very much introverted in its issues, she wrote this vast, rambling account of a culture dominated by a woman.

And it’s just the most extraordinary thing, you wonder how did she… Where’d she ever get the idea of a fiction, that fits into the history of her people, so you can’t disprove the fiction.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

John Casteen:

And in the process, creates this woman who fills up the culture. She’s not perfect, she’s not especially kind, she has a husband who is a failure so she contrives to have him murdered, right outside the bedroom door. On the other hand, she also dominates and pushes her people toward excellence, toward values that they wouldn’t have had without her. That this writer is anonymous is really part of what I find fascinating. I’ve been reading Icelandic old Norse text for pushing 50 years I guess, the only one I’ve ever read that appeared to have been written by a woman. And yet, this thing sort of screams woman consciousness.

Jay Lemons:

Fabulous. What’s your fondest memory of your undergraduate experience on grounds at the University?

John Casteen:

This is a story of a different time, a different place, I finished up the… I took what would be called in the UK a second-class honors degree, or a degree with high honors, in a scheme where there was highest high, and just honors. Finished up that set of examinations, and was a very formal kind of place. A professor I admired, and who had shared the committee said, “Let’s walk up to the faculty club and have a cup of coffee.” I had this epiphany walking up there, this is probably what people ought to be doing. And I remember thinking, why are we starting this now, why haven’t we done this for four years?” It changed my… Well, it informed right there my sense of optimal relations between faculty and student.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. I love that story, John. It reminds me that you taught regularly through all those years, and in trying to support you, the most stressful hours each week were the four to six hours before class, and you were always in your best mood of the week guaranteed coming out of class. But, yeah. Favorite tradition?

John Casteen:

Oh, wow. I liked when I was at the University of Connecticut, the tradition of having students, and faculty, and people who worked in the boiler room, and the President, and so on, meet once a month at the University senate, not as the faculty senate or somebody else’s something. But, as the University senate. I remember being puzzled the first couple of times I attended it, because I was sitting next to people who were not faculty senators. And I realized that this was a form of collaborative self-governance that you don’t find, except in universities.

Jay Lemons:

New England Town Hall sort of flavor, interesting.

John Casteen:

It was very much that sort of thing. And I admired that tremendously, and I thought, “There’s a model for everybody.” Which in fact, not everybody finds palatable, but it has a lot to do with equitable ownership of the institution and of its processes and so on. That senate, and I’ve seen good senates. I was a member of the senate at Berkeley, in the period after Cambodia and so on. And worked with the senate in Charlottesville for 20 years, with a lot of admiration for what they were doing. But this one at Yukon was… It had a kind of process command of the university that I really admired. I thought it was effective, it was crisp, I never saw anybody waste the senate’s time. People who had something to say realized that they were on a rare sort of space when they said it. I’m sure in any delivery body there are moments of silliness, but not many. And I don’t remember one.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Hey, if you hadn’t worked in higher education, if you’d not found a calling in higher ed, what would you have done?

John Casteen:

I would most likely have gone to law school, but I didn’t do that because that’s what I was supposed to have done in the first place. Or, I might have gone into the Navy, because just the chance to be on and about ships on the sea, it always appealed to me. But the truth is, I never really went into that career. When I retired here, I was asked, “How did you go about getting various jobs?” The truth is that jobs kind of hit me in the head like a thrown brick, I don’t remember ever actively seeking one, except that I sent the usual letters out when I finished the PhD. In those days you wrote 50 letters, and you got five interviews, and if you were lucky you got an offer to somewhere. But, that was the end of it.

After that, I had the luxury of being persuaded by people I respected that something was a good idea for me to do. It’s raw coincidence, there was nothing special about my situation, I just happened to fall into that circumstance, whatever it was, four, five times in the course of my life.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for answering those calls, though. As we wrap up here, I’d really like to close by asking you to share whatever you want about the distinctive qualities, if you will, the organizational DNA at that place that was the object of your attention for the longest time in your life, UVA.

John Casteen:

Yeah. You know, I always felt that it was imperfect, that it was worth prodding and jogging and so on. I always felt that it had a kind of representative value to it, people who grew up in my circumstances, where my dad’s daily workflows were khaki or denim. But, I was as a student and later working alongside people of every conceivable kind. I came to college with the sort of foolish expectation that I would be working with minority persons, that I would sit next to… I hadn’t focused on the fact that it was a single sex college, it just seemed natural that the girls from my high school went to Holland’s, or to Randolph, [inaudible 01:01:42], Walman’s, or wherever they went. It was a very parochial kind of environment.

And it seemed deeply natural that I would come to school here. And I had some support from my parents in that, the only collegiate institution east of Richmond when I was a boy was William & Mary College. And, that sort of says something about the nature of opportunity in the US between, let’s say the end of World War Two and the mid ’60s. The only public opportunity for African American students when I was growing up was Virginia State, at [inaudible 01:02:35], Norfolk State evolved while I was in school. I taught piecemeal here and there for a year while I was in graduate school, and one of the places where I worked was an institution at Princess Anne Maryland called Maryland State College, which became the 1890 Land Grant college at the University of Maryland, by virtue of a move made by the Maryland legislature to avoid de-segregating in the late ’70s, early ’80s in the Adams overs, you know?

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

John Casteen:

I was fascinated by the excellence of that place, by the determination and integrity of the faculty and the students. But also by a few sort of jaundiced, older colleagues who said, “This is never going to work.” And I listened to their descriptions of what they saw as the failure of the American dream and things. At the same time I was teaching what was then a two year branch college at the University of Virginia, on the eastern shore, and I was teaching farm kids and so on. I got an intellectually superb Mennonite student who would occasionally stop and talk to me, but at one point she stopped and she said that she could not read an assigned book, I’ve forgotten what it was, one that was a sort of adolescent maturation book she was assigned for a freshman writing course.

And I said, “Well, okay. Why don’t I give you a different book to read?” Didn’t have any interest in books and reading list. And she got interested in Henry James, and as long as I had contact with her, she was a middle-aged farm [inaudible 01:04:49] by that time, she was reading Henry James, and was thinking about Henry James’ issues and so on. Not quite approving of Henry James, which was fine too. Not sure I quite approve of Henry James.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I think this is a theme, John, I deeply appreciate about you. You have always, I think, been a supporter of the underdogs, and your devotion to the College at Wise was an incredibly powerful example of that. But, just hearing about your experiences at what is today Maryland Eastern Shore, that again, it comes back to this thematic of championing those who have not had privilege, and not had access, and not had power, and wow. It’s an extraordinary legacy of yours, and I want to thank you for being with us, I want to thank you for championing and taking chances on Marsha and me, and countless generations of others who have had the benefit of-

John Casteen:

You’re generous Jay, thank you. In truth, I’m not sure that I did much other than say, “There’s the door open.”

Jay Lemons:

We’ll save that for another show, and I seriously do think about this. Why the heck did you turn to a 32-year-old kid, to take on a sticky situation? And that might be worth another conversation some day, because I think about my obligations to be doing the same, and to championing the risks that I know that you took in creating leadership opportunities for folks like me and many others.

John Casteen:

Wow. I think I got that one right, Jay.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I-

John Casteen:

And I think you and Marsha got it right, so…

Jay Lemons:

Well, thank you very much. Listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we should feature in upcoming segments, you can send those to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you find your podcasts. It’s also available on the Academic Search website. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together, our mission is to support colleges, universities during times of transition, or through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy. Again, it’s been a really special joy and pleasure to have John Casteen on our program today. John, thank you again for joining.

John Casteen:

Thanks for inviting me.