Ask average Americans what they've seen in the last four years, and they'll probably give you one of a number of answers.
Maybe they'll say that a president got embroiled in a sex scandal and underwent an embarrassing - and revealing - impeachment trial. Or another president got elected without the popular vote but only after debates over the gray areas in everything political: the Electoral College, punch-card voting machines, butterfly ballots, hanging chads and state vs. federal rights. Or a popular princess died in an auto accident, and a shooting at a Colorado high school showed America that no place is immune to violence and bloodshed.
Maybe they'll mention Y2K, if they can remember what it stands for.
But University students have seen even more happen in the community that they call their own, and they've been an integral part of it. In four years, students have played roles in the evolution of the honor system, ongoing looks at the judiciary system and the developments in the way the University perceives race in all aspects of its operations. We've seen the Dalai Lama, Dave Matthews and Pete Gillen come, and we've seen Richard Smith, Thomas Jones and a slew of influential faculty members and administrators go. A few people and things, such as Ronald Curry and a long-anticipated shop on the Corner, never arrived in the first place.
Not that it mattered much. The last four years haven't been about things lost out on or experiences missed. They've been about understanding the University community through what's happened in it.
And a lot has happened.
The First Year: 1997-98
Carl W. Smith was the talk of the town when the school year began in 1997. In June, Smith, a 1950 graduate and a former lineman for the football team, pledged $25 million to refurbishing Scott Stadium, the single largest gift in University history. The money would go toward adding 16,500 seats, luxury suites, a projection scoreboard and other cosmetic improvements. The whole project eventually cost $86 million, way past the original projection of $50 million.
Meanwhile, the University mourned the loss of Edgar F. Shannon Jr., its fourth president. Shannon died on Aug. 24 at the age of 79.
In September, a forum about a proposal for Congress to issue a national apology for slavery turned into a widely publicized scuffle that got the University talking about race relations. At the end of the forum, Avon Drake, a black Virginia Commonwealth University professor who was participating in the discussion, approached Deborah Higgins, a white University police officer, after Higgins accused a black student of stealing a backpack. Higgins and Drake got into a verbal confrontation over the incident that Drake claimed turned physical. He said Higgins pushed him and caused buttons to pop off his jacket. Afterward, Drake filed a lawsuit against Higgins, University Police Chief Michael Sheffield issued an open letter of apology, and William W. Harmon, vice president for student affairs, started a faculty-student committee to review the incident.
But in June 1999, a judge threw out Drake's complaint, citing a lack of factual evidence.
On Nov. 30, Leslie Ann Baltz, a 21-year-old fourth-year College student, died after falling down a flight of stairs on a football weekend. The death was the University's 18th alcohol-related fatality in eight years. It initiated a series of conversations on the University's drinking culture and prompted officials to start a task force on alcohol abuse and reconsider the structure of the Inter-Fraternity Council's fall rush system.
Bodo's Bagel Bakery on the Corner, promised by its ownership to be opened by 1996 when its idea was originally conceived in 1995, still was not operational after a series of delays. Owner Brian Fox, however, apologized for the wait, put up a "Coming Here" sign and said the shop would open by spring 1998.
In February, the University celebrated the surprising success of its ongoing Capital Campaign when officials raised the campaign's fund-raising goal from $750 million to a cool $1 billion.
With April showers came the death of fall rush for the fraternity system, though not without a long debate over the purpose of fraternities and the extent of student self-governance. Dean of Students Robert T. Canaveri gave the IFC the opportunity to keep rush in the fall, but President Al Park and the IFC scoffed at the proposal, which would have banned kegs from parties and shortened the allowed period for pledging. In announcing the University's decision, Casteen said, "The culture surrounding rush, including its acceptance of underage use of alcohol, poses a significant hazard to the intellectual culture that is the University's natural environment."
Student self-governance also was under pressure in Student Council. In February, Dan Soschin, Council's vice president for administration was arrested for embezzling funds, a charge to which he later pled no contest. Christopher Butler, a former Council chief financial officer, was arrested for writing checks to himself and was sentenced to serve two days in jail.
In May, the 71-member task force on alcohol abuse proposed a long list of recommendations for curbing irresponsible drinking. Among 34 recommendations, the task force asked the University to put student birth dates on IDs and create more non-alcoholic alternatives on weekends. The University did not approve one of the task force's foremost recommendations, however: banning alcohol from pre-game tailgates.
In response to the report, Big White Tent was erected.
Bad news turned into worse for the men's basketball team, which started the year with word that star forward Courtney Alexander would transfer after a criminal conviction for assaulting his fiancee. Then the team suffered through its worst season in 35 years, finishing 11-19 and costing its coach, Jeff Jones, his job of eight seasons. That began the tenure of Pete Gillen, the red-headed coach with a thick New York accent who left Providence to head the Cavaliers.
The football team was overlooked by the bowls and the national polls but recorded a respectable 1997 season with a 7-4 record. Senior safety Anthony Poindexter got most of the attention, earning an All-American nod. Coach George Welsh also made headlines when he became the all-time ACC leader in career coaching victories midway through the season.
Ronald Curry enraged Virginia fans everywhere when the Hampton two-sport standout, who was given high school player of the year honors from some national publications in both basketball and football, reneged on his verbal commitment to play for the Cavaliers. Instead, Curry went to North Carolina, where in his first season, he was named College Jerk of the Year by the Tank McNamara comic strip.
The Class of 1998 left to the commencement address of recently elected Gov. James R. Gilmore III (R), who urged the 4,200 graduates to not sacrifice education for economic goals. Said Gilmore: "I suggest that satisfaction would best be achieved by finding ways to maximize freedom for people so that they can define their own lives - to lessen the threat that government or some special-interest group will define their lives for them."
The Second Year: 1998-99
In summer 1998, the University took a big blow from the media when its medical center became synonymous with the phrase "baby switch." Everybody from the national and international press to Jay Leno ridiculed the University Hospital after officials discovered in June that two girls born in 1995 were given to the wrong parents.
DNA tests confirmed that Carrie Marie Jewel Conley and Rebecca Grace Chittum were switched at birth. Paula Johnson, who had raised Carrie as her own, discovered that Carrie was the biological child of Tamara Whitney Rogers and Kevin Chittum, who died in a car accident in July 1998 without knowing that Rebecca was not their biological child. The courts decided that the babies should stay with the families who raised them - Carrie with Johnson and Rebecca with her grandparents - and the Rogers and Chittum families settled with the Commonwealth for $2 million. Johnson, however, did not relent and started a series of public accusations and legal wrangling that lasted until April 2001.
In response to the uproar from state officials and accusations by Johnson that the children were not given adequate identification bracelets, the hospital reorganized its top management and pledged to improve security measures and identification procedures.
In July, the Board of Visitors gave its OK to start a University plan to create a satellite campus in Qatar. The royal family in the Middle East nation offered along with Qatari corporations to pay the cost of the campus, which would have been placed in Doha, Qatar's capital.
However, concerns about religious and sexual discrimination from faculty and lawmakers halted the progress of the plan. It was eventually dropped in summer 1999 amid questions about its educational standards.
For Bodo's, the wait continued. A "Coming Soon, Promise" sign appeared on the widow of the unopened Corner location, and Fox, the owner, said it would "definitely open this year," meaning 1999.
Students scurried with anticipation in November when a conference on human rights, conflict and reconciliation brought nine Nobel Laureates to town. People camped outside Scott Stadium for tickets to see, among others, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Compromise was the key to a more local issue: changing the name of Clinch Valley College, the only branch campus of the University. A proposal would have changed the Wise, Va., liberal arts college's name to University of Virginia-Wise, but that angered many University students and alumni who said that would dilute the prestige of the University of Virginia name. In February, the General Assembly agreed to an alternative: University of Virginia's College at Wise.
Also in February, the University was put on alert by conservative think tanks that its admissions policies heavily favored blacks over whites. According to the Center For Equal Opportunity, the University rejected white applicants for black applicants in ways that made a black student 45 times more likely to be admitted. The report led to Linda Chavez, the CEO's president, lashing out publicly against John A. Blackburn, dean of admissions, in a debate held on Grounds.
Meanwhile, the Center for Individual Rights reported that the University's admissions practices could be found illegal in court, as had occurred with other prominent schools. That prompted the Board to convene a special committee to look into the University's admissions policies.
Later in the month, a high-profile assault brought unwanted attention to four football players. Second-team All-ACC running back Antwoine Womack, safety Devon Simmons, former safety Adrian Burnam and linebacker John Duckett were arrested and charged after Jonathan Dean and Cabral Thorton were assaulted near Kerchof Hall. Womack was convicted of a misdemeanor count of assault and battery and left the team for a year before returning in 2000. He received no sentence from the University Judiciary Committee.
News also came out of Lexington, Va., where five pledges at the University chapter of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity were arrested in mid-February on several felony counts for breaking into the Phi Kappa Psi house at Washington & Lee University. The pledges were found with 11 letters in their car from fraternity brothers instructing them to vandalize houses at W&L and Duke and steal items for a scavenger hunt. Eventually, the felony counts were dropped to misdemeanors and the cases were dismissed for the students agreeing to do community service.
In April, about 400 students rallied on the Lawn in protest of the continued enrollment of three students, Richard Smith, Bradley Kintz and Harrison Kerr Tigrett, all involved in an assault of Alexander "Sandy" Kory in November 1997. Though the Judiciary Comittee expelled the three in November 1998 for the assault for which they received jail time and misdemeanor sentences, the students appealed the decision to the Judicial Review Board because they had not attended the original hearing. They said they had not been told that the hearing had been postponed.
The JRB sent the case back to UJC. In April 1999, however, before the Committee could hear the case, three trial prosecutors resigned, fearing a lawsuit from Smith, whose father Frederick W. Smith is the chairman of the parent company of Federal Express. The trial chairwoman also resigned.
The students chanted "Hey, hey ho, ho, assault on Grounds has got to," as Kory stepped to a microphone and told the story of his assault. After a long trial process that shed light on the workings of the judiciary system and the faith administrators have in the way it is run by students, Casteen stepped in and suspended Smith for two years, Tigrett for one and Kintz for one semester.
The biggest sports star of the year came from an unlikely place. Peggy Boutilier, a women's lacrosse and field hockey player, was named the NCAA Woman of the Year by the NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics after two seasons as the Intercollegiate Women's Lacrosse Coaches Association player of the year.
The men's soccer team finished 16-4-1, but took a big hit in the summer when it lost two of its biggest talents to Major League Soccer. Jason Moore of the men's soccer team became the first Virginia player to be a No. 1 draft pick in over a decade when the D.C. United took the sophomore midfielder with the 1999 MLS college draft's first pick in February. In July, sophomore forward Chris Albright, an all-American, left for the professional league.
In football, Todd Braverman was the scapegoat of the season, criticized for missing a potentially game-winning field goal with 19 seconds to go in the Peach Bowl. The Cavaliers lost to Georgia, 35-33, and finished 9-3.
The men's basketball team had a rebuilding season, in more ways than one. First, the staff had to deal with the closing of University Hall in August for structural repair work on 32 broken support wires. Though the building was opened in time for the start of the season, a lot of work had to be done on the Cavaliers throughout the season. With seven scholarship players and seven walk-ons - five of whom were taken from open tryouts - the Cavaliers finished 14-16. However, the team did win four conference games, and forward Chris Williams took the ACC rookie of the year award.
On the women's side, coach Debbie Ryan won her 500th game in her career on Feb. 21 in a match against Florida State.
In the spring, the men's lacrosse team won both the NCAA and ACC championships. In the NCAA final, the Cavaliers defeated Syracuse, 12-10, to win their first national title in 27 years.
For the graduation of the Class of 1999, the University brought in former U.S. Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. to deliver a commencement address he entitled "What Will Be." Baker urged graduates to live life with a conscience and care about the world. "Each of you has an opportunity, I believe, a responsibility - to improve our culture, expand our knowledge, enrich our economy, strengthen our family, care for the outcast, comfort the afflicted and fulfill the promise of humanity touched by divinity," he said.
The Third Year: 1999-2000
The old issues of race in admissions and the decisions of the Judiciary Committee brought new headlines in 1999.
The judicial war over the aftermath of the Kory beating continued over the summer, this time in the courts. Smith, the student suspended for one year for the assault on Kory, filed a $1.25 million lawsuit in July alleging that the punishment was too harsh. However, in October 2000, a federal jury ruled in favor of the University, ending the three-year ordeal.
In September, a Board of Visitors committee studying race in admissions returned with its findings, which sparked a heated debate on the meaning of diversity and the concept of affirmative action. The committee, chaired by Alexandria lawyer Terence P. Ross, said the University should change its affirmative action program lest it open itself to lawsuits accusing it of giving black applicants preferential treatment.
The University responded quickly. In October, Casteen announced that the Admissions Office would cease use of its 6-year-old point system that gave extra points to applicants who were non-white, among other criteria. Race would still be a factor in considering applicants, however, Casteen said.
Meanwhile, Ross came under fire for comments he made in the Daily Progress, where he said the University is "clearly in some cases reaching a little down our academic standards to recruit blacks students." He and the Virginia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People clashed, and the NAACP demanded his removal for the Board. Ross survived the conflict, however, and was reappointed to the Board in 2001.
The Honor Committee became the latest target of accusations of racial bias in October when it released for the first time its trial figures broken down by race. One figure especially alarmed M. Rick Turner, dean of the Office of African-American Affairs, who denounced the honor system publicly: 97 percent of cases in 1998-1999 were brought by whites. The Committee, under the direction of Chairman Hunter Ferguson, responded by saying it would address any issues of racial spotlighting in its cases but that the Committee itself does not initiate cases, which would point the blame for any problems on to the student body as a whole.
The Honor Committee received another dose of attention on Oct. 15 when Maurice G. Goodreau III filed a lawsuit in circuit court claiming that the Committee violated his constitutional rights in revoking his business degree eight years after he graduated. Goodreau first came under investigation in 1990 when it was found that as president of the karate club, he used club funds for his personal use. But it wasn't until May 1998 that the Committee ruled that his degree should be taken back.
November brought more pressure on the Admissions Office, though this time it wasn't about race. The Cavalier Daily reported, and officials confirmed, that applicants with wealthy parents were tracked by the Development Office and the lists of potential donors were handed to the Admissions Office. That opened up the potential for wealthy students to get an advantage.
On the Corner, there was still no sign of a Bodo's, except for the abbreviated "Coming" notice on its window. Fox, the owner, said that the store was nearly done, and it was just a matter of hiring workers.
Race returned as an issue quickly after the Winter Break. In February, application statistics showed a revealing decrease in black applicants - a drop of about 25 percent - that officials attributed to the ongoing debate over affirmative action in admissions and the removal of the point systems in considering applicants. There was also an overall decrease in admissions numbers of 16 percent.
The big sports news revolved around two names, Thomas Jones and Ed Moses, who both turned heads nationally and internationally. Jones, a senior runn3ing back, became Virginia's first consensus All-American in over a half-century, set 15 school and eight Atlantic Coast Conference records, and finished third in the country in both rushing and all-purpose yards. Then in April, Jones led a charge of four Cavaliers taken in the NFL Draft, going with the seventh pick in the first round to the Arizona Cardinals.
Virginia, however, did not fare so well. Though the Cavaliers finished with an overall record of 7-5, recording their 13th-straight seven-win season, they self-destructed in the 1999 Micronpc.com Bowl, losing 63-21 to Illinois. That caused coach George Welsh to pledge that next season he would "reinvent the corporation."
Moses started the 2000 swimming season on the path to national stardom. In March, he shattered the world short course records in the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke at the NCAA championships. In April, Moses won the same events at the national championships. Then in September, as the commentators around the world made clever comments about the swimmer "parting water," Moses grabbed an individual silver medal in the 100 breast at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. A week later, he was part of the victorious U.S. 4x100 medley relay team, which lowered the world record by more than a second.
For the men's basketball team, excitement combined with frustration in Gillen's second season. The team finished third in the ACC after winning 19 games but wasn't offered a bid to the NCAA tournament, a surprise to many. Instead, Virginia competed in the National Invitational Tournament, where it lost to Georgetown in a marathon three-overtime game in the first round. Still, it was the Cavaliers' first postseason appearance since 1996-97 and gave a good indication that better things were on the horizon.
Graduates in the Class of 2000 left to the distinctive drawl of Andy Rooney, the reflective commentator on CBS's "60 Minutes" who was the featured speaker at graduation. Rooney advised students to pursue their dreams and not look to technology to solve their problems. "Look at where you are in relation to the history of the world before you decide what to do," he said.
The Fourth Year: 2000-01
Students returned to Charlottesville in September to sobering news. The University's contract with Coca-Cola ended over the summer, and Dining Services had switched to Pepsi exclusively. Within months, students had to search high and low to find a Coke.
But celebration followed shortly when the newly refurbished football stadium opened. The expanded Carl Smith Center debuted on Sept. 2 to impressive fanfare, including fly-overs and a performance from country music artist Chad Brock. Participants in the stadium dedication were wowed by the improvements that came with the $86 million price tag, including a Jeffersonian pergola and expanded restrooms and concession stands. However, the Cavaliers lost the football game to Brigham Young.
Right after students saw the fruition of Smith's $25 million donation, another philanthropist gave a quarter of a billion to the University. Halsey Minor, founder of CNET and a 1987 University graduate, donated $25 million to the College to create a "Digital Academical Village," which would integrate technology with the humanities. "Jefferson wanted to create the most modern University in the world," Minor said.
The honor system went on trial in November when a review panel returned with recommendations to "save the System before its too late." Though the panel report declined to make changes to the single sanction, it did include criticism about the rate at which minorities are punished and about the system's trial process, which it called too "legalistic and adversarial."
And as most of the country focused on the whirlwind events of the presidential election, the University community and Charlottesville turned to its police force, which arrested three current and six former students in a drug bust. The year-long investigation and subsequent arrests showed all was not quiet in Charlottesville.
In March, students voted down three of four proposals that the Honor Committee took from the review commission's report to streamline its process. They approved the one that changed honor counselors role at trial from a representative to an adviser, making students more responsible for their own defense. However, proposals to eliminate random student juries, give honor officers mandatory seats on juries and lower the number of votes needed for conviction did not pass. A proposal that would have eliminated the consideration of seriousness in cases of academic cheating also failed. Committee members responded to the results of the voting with almost resounding disappointment. "It's back to the drawing board," said Thomas Hall, the Honor Committee chairman.
Meanwhile, University higher-ups were cheering the successful completion of the Capital Campaign, which ended after seven years with $1.43 billion. That made the University's effort the second-most successful fund-raising campaign ever undertaken by a state university.
However, the University was not rolling in the money, thanks to a move by Gilmore to defer campus construction projects. The governor enraged university administrators around the state by ordering a freeze on discretionary spending, which killed the University's plans to finish a studio arts building and a special collections library on schedule. The executive order was precipitated by a budget impasse in the state legislature, created by strife over reducing the state's car tax.
On April 21, all heads turned to Scott Stadium, which housed its first major concert. And a major one it was: Dave Matthews, a Charlottesville resident and a staple in CD players and MP3 lists University-wide, played for 50,000 ecstatic fans. Though Matthews didn't deliver on his earlier promise of two shows, the success of his Saturday concert showed the stadium could serve as more than a football field.
The athletics department grabbed headlines in April after a task force reported to the Board of Visitors that the program would have a $47 million deficit by 2010. The task force made several proposals to alleviate financial problems, among them a tiering system for sports that enraged coaches and players of smaller sports hurt by the system. The Board will vote on the proposals over the summer.
Then in the first week of May, Terry Holland, a mainstay in Virginia sports for nearly three decades, announced that he would step down from his position as athletics director to become an assistant to the president and raise funds for a new basketball arena.
But the same week, national media put the spotlight back on the honor system, questioning the effectiveness of the 158-year honor code. As students prepared for the end of the semester, Louis Bloomfield, a physics professor, sent 122 students to the Honor Committee, the largest one-time investigation in the system's history. Bloomfield used a computer program to check papers turned in for his "How Things Work" class for evidence of plagarism.
Meanwhile, the University community was shocked by the murder of Allison J. Meloy, a 28-year-old graduate student in the government department. Two suspects have been arrested in the slaying.
In sports, legendary football coach George Welsh retired after the Cavaliers lost in the Oahu Bowl after seeing his team dwindle during its 6-6 season. In December, Virginia hired Al Groh, a former NFL coach who graduated from the University in 1967, to replace Welsh.
But at University Hall, a new brand of energy was created by the men's basketball team, which rose to a top-10 ranking in the national polls for the first time in nearly a decade. The team won 20 games - 14 of them in front of raucous home crowds - and beat Duke, North Carolina, Maryland and Wake Forest before losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to Gonzaga.
The women's basketball team, however, got some scary news before its season started when Ryan underwent surgery in August to remove a tumor from her pancreas. She returned to coach the entire season, however, and led the Cavaliers to the NCAA tournament for the 18th consecutive time. Sophomore forward Schuye LaRue was named to the All-ACC team.
For graduation, the Class of 2001 will hear from Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who heads the international Human Genome Project. Collins, a 1970 graduate, oversees the 13-year project that could change the way medicine treats the human body.
Three years, eight months and 21 days ago, President Casteen stood at the Rotunda and asked a few things of the entering Class of 2001. Embrace University ideals. Recognize differences among classmates. Take advantage of the knowledge that is the center of Mr. Jefferson's University.
For the most part, the class has followed that advice but it still will leave with a few issues unresolved.
After four years of comings and goings, Bodo's still hasn't arrived.
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