Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006030115
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: STORRS, CONN. LENGTH: Long
Geography professor John Allen saw beyond the adjectives during a 7 a.m. breakfast a few years ago in the president's office at the University of Connecticut, where Casteen has been chief executive since 1985.
Instead of being greeted by campus food service workers eager to pour coffee and serve Danish, there stood Casteen, sleeves rolled up, smiling and asking Allen how he liked his eggs.
"This isn't a cold, austere person who does something like this," Allen said in an interview on the Connecticut campus.
Peter McFadden, Casteen's special assistant at UConn, recounts a markedly different experience. On his first day as the president's right-hand man, McFadden - a former engineering dean and interim provost - sent his first completed assignment to his new boss.
Casteen asked three questions, each more insightful than the last. Evidently dissatisfied with the answers, he looked at his new aide and said, "I see you don't know any more about this than I do," McFadden recalls.
"I knew I hadn't done my homework completely. I had partial answers, partial responses. He caught me out the first day. If someone did not do their homework or were in any way sloppy, it would not be a fruitful meeting with him."
Judging by the image McFadden fashions of his departing chief - Casteen becomes UVa's seventh president Aug. 1 - the mild dressing-down deepened his respect for a man whom critics call aloof, austere and arrogant and whom supporters describe as intense, indefatigable and brilliant.
Indeed, what folks here think of Casteen seems to have everything to do with context. Aloofness for some is shyness to others. "I think John takes an awful lot of knowing," said Peter Halvorsen, a former aide. "He has some characteristics that can be misinterpreted."
Friends say the 46-year-old Casteen, deaf in his left ear since his late 20s, may lean away from conversations to hear better, conveying the impression that he's not paying attention. Occasionally he'll cup his right ear or move to the left side of someone with whom he's talking.
"If you deal with any kind of handicap like that, you have to make some kind of adjustment to deal with people," Casteen said in an interview. The deafness is accompanied by tinnitus, - a loud roaring on the left side of his head that sometimes forces him to move around a conversation in search of the best angle.
Interviews with UConn faculty members, deans, trustees, top administrators and student leaders paint a portrait of a complex university president who alienated some with his hands-on management style, forcing the departures of aides and vice presidents.
But they credit Casteen with repairing the university's relations with Gov. William O'Neill, effectively lobbying state legislators in Hartford and rehabilitating the school's discredited athletic program.
He also led a successful campaign to keep the governor and lawmakers from cutting Connecticut's comparatively meager support for higher education as they tried to grapple with an economic downturn.
"He thinks very politically," said Peter Barth, an economics professor and chairman of the faculty senate executive committee. "When something comes up his instinct is to say, `What is the political fallout of this going to be?' "
Casteen's years as former Gov. Charles Robb's secretary of education, a job he and others say taught him to make difficult choices when necessary, appear to have served him well in Connecticut.
Before joining the Robb administration in 1982, Casteen spent seven years as UVa's dean of admissions, crisscrossing the state in search of students. Those journeys, including a record-setting six high school visits in one day, helped make him a favorite of several generations of UVa alumni - a constituency vital to large-scale fund raising.
Now, as Casteen returns to his alma mater, his political savvy and management acumen will be tested as he seeks to bolster UVa's position as the state's flagship university and as he tries to decide how best to organize the top administration in Charlottesville.
Almost every discussion of Casteen's years at Connecticut returns to his management style, his intensity, his evident precision, even his mannerisms.
"He is a very hands-on president, needing to know all the details," said Barth, the economics professor. "The closest thing I can come to is Jimmy Carter's style of leadership: He had to know more details than he needed to."
Said Halvorsen, the former assistant: "He doesn't delegate things very well. I hope John doesn't get into running things at that level [at UVa]. That's a trap for him. He's a bright guy and his tendency is to think he can solve everything."
McFadden, Casteen's special assistant, acknowledges that the president is detail-oriented, but insists he's not a micro-manager.
"My sense is that he's interested in those details so that he can understand why a recommendation is the way it is, why the result happened the way it did," McFadden said.
Casteen is demanding, officials say - of himself and the people around him.
Several vice presidents - not to mention a few presidential assistants - stepped down and returned to teaching during the Casteen years, prompting talk about the president's style and expectations.
"Yes, he's demanding and yes, some of the people left because they were p----- off. Too bad," Allen said. "He does not hesitate to let people know when they have not done their job properly. I see that as an asset."
Athletic Director Todd Turner said: "One thing about John Casteen is he's tough. There's no clock. He's resilient. He works hard. He can take setbacks and rebound and go after it again doggedly."
Casteen acknowledges that he can be a tough chief executive, but says "the ways in which one is demanding depends on the challenges" facing his administration at Connecticut or UVa.
"If you're going to make hard decisions . . . people who disagree with you on the issues will go after you on personality," he said, calling this one of several lessons he's learned as a university president and state education secretary.
"Finally, you make a certain number of mistakes in my profession and you have to realize you're not perfect."
Barth, the economics professor, wondered in an interview if the bureaucratic shuffling should be attributed to Casteen's ballyhooed "high standards" or whether the president had trouble getting along with subordinates.
"Part of the problem internally is he never clearly defined the reporting relationship of the vice presidents and the provost and never clearly defined their authority," said Frank Vasington, dean of the college of arts and sciences.
Casteen explains the turnover by pointing to a charge from the board of trustees that he help form a new generation of leadership at the four-campus university.
Andrew Canzonetti, board chairman for 10 years, confirms that Casteen was asked to "build an administrative team that would be the team of the future" and said that at least one of the vice presidents who stepped down had plans to return to the classroom before Casteen's arrival.
"We didn't notice as a trustee group that this [turnover] was hurting us," he said.
Building a new administrative team is a task awaiting Casteen at UVa. Last year, departing President Robert O'Neil unveiled a plan to give the president primarily external duties such as fund raising and legislative affairs. The provost is responsible for academic issues.
When O'Neil resigned in October, officials decided to leave the hiring of a new provost as well as a vice president of development to the new president.
In his conversations and speeches, Casteen makes clear he's interested in more than fund raising, budget meetings and management structures.
As past president of the College Board, a nationwide consortium that oversees standardized testing, he is a strong proponent of curriculum review. He also preaches diversity on campus - diversity within the student body and faculty and diversity of academic programs.
There's Casteen the intellectual, English professor and Beowulf scholar, who occasionally taught an undergraduate literature course at Connecticut and who faculty members say respected their role in running the 25,000-student school.
Some student leaders still are amazed that Casteen would take time from what aides call his "killer schedule" to talk about their plans for student government or to discuss political strategy with undergraduate lobbyists.
But Casteen was not often seen wandering around campus or popping into student government meetings - though he was a regular at faculty senate gatherings. Spontaneity, school leaders agree, was not a hallmark of his administration.
"My personal belief is that's not what you want a university president to do," said Matthew Kirk, president of undergraduate student government. "The greatest single thing I admire about him is his ability to talk about issues . . . and know more about them than the people he's talking to."
Casteen inherits a UVa campus where, as recently as this spring, the first black elected student council president was asked to resign before taking office and racial slurs were painted on a bus stop heavily used by black students.
He has experience in handling racial problems on campus: Three years ago, Asian-American students on their way to a semiformal dance at UConn were harassed and spat upon by some white students.
Consequently, experimental cultural diversity classes will be taught this fall. And Connecticut's board of trustees is expected to consider a plan for a multicultural affairs division in a meeting this month.
Orin Levy, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, said the steps Casteen took in the wake of the 1987 incident changed the tone on campus from, "[Racism] exists, we're set in our ways" to, "It's intolerable."
Said Casteen: "Universities are not doing enough to build an appreciation for the complexity of our civilization, to make people aware of the fact that you and I are different is good, not bad."
He also is applauded for restoring the credibility of UConn's athletic program.
Before UConn's Counseling Program for Intercollegiate Athletics was created in 1986, virtually none of the basketball team members graduated, officials said. In the past several years since the program was begun, eight of 10 players who finished their senior years graduated, Turner said.
An avid hiker and sailor, Casteen "understands the importance of athletics, but he also understands its place," said Turner, who left the UVa athletic department to take the top job at UConn. "I think he sensitized the institution to the feeling that there's nothing wrong with a successful athletic program so long as it's academically credible."
At UVa, where the athletic and academic programs already are widely respected, there's eagerness for the new president to quickly get down to business.
"I think people have pulled in behind him and are anxious to get him on board," said John Blackburn, dean of admissions. "It's been eight years [and two presidents] since he left."
Arts and sciences dean Alexander Sedgwick, calling Casteen a "no-nonsense, tough-minded type," contends that UVa needs a president for the 1990s who knows the university, its alumni and Richmond. "And as I talk to people on the faculty, I don't sense much opposition to that," Sedgwick said.
In a recent meeting with the university's deans, Sedgwick recalled, Casteen said "he was going to hit the deck running when he gets here in August. We were glad to hear that."
Casteen, for his part, wants to bolster UVa's status as one of the nation's premier public universities, eventually pushing the school "into the ranks of the very strongest, regardless of whether they're public or private."
Diversification - of the students, faculty and academic program - are crucial to reaching the pinnacle to which Casteen and, presumably, the Board of Visitors which hired him, aspire. "Stagnation is a real enemy of excellence in universities," he said.
by CNB