As I prepare to return to the University for the annual November gathering of Cavalier Daily alumni this weekend, I do so with a tranquility and a sense of "fitting in" that I never truly felt as a student some four decades ago.
The reasons for this are important for our new president, Teresa A. Sullivan, to grasp as part of the institutional history she inherits in order to fully understand the watershed legacy of her predecessor, John T. Casteen, III.
Much has been written in the last year about Casteen's accomplishments during his two decades in office, but one can only appreciate the enormity of them when they are placed in a candid historical context, which I have not seen done anywhere.
When I arrived as a first-year student in fall 1969, the undergraduate population was still all-male (that changed the following year) and overwhelmingly lily-white (that did not). I knew I had the birthright to be accepted into the University's fraternal-elitist circles, which were omnipresent at the time, but I had no interest in doing so, for reasons that would fester over the next few years.
By the following spring, campuses around the nation were in tumult, as Vietnam War protests - aggravated by the Kent State University student killings - led to the closing of many universities. While there was plenty of protesting taking place across Grounds - reaching its zenith in an all-night standoff between students and state police on Emmet Street, and a confrontation resulting in 68 arrests on the Lawn - the University managed to stay open.
This was the defining moment of Edgar Shannon's presidency. He supported the students and publicly denounced President Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia, an act of administrative brinkmanship that almost cost him his job.
While not an ideologue by nature, Shannon rose to the occasion in an era when many University presidents - most famously, Grayson Kirk at Columbia University in 1968 - imploded under the pressure.
As editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily in 1972-73, I would meet with Shannon regularly every month at his invitation, in his Pavilion VIII office. I always left these hour-long sessions impressed by how even-handed and level-headed he was. If he had a shortcoming it was that he was perhaps too much of a peacekeeper, too tolerant of the cultural status quo, of which I had grown contemptuous.
In my "Parting Shot" for this newspaper in March 1973, I summed up the philosophy that my colleagues and I had put forth so passionately on these pages over the preceding year: "This should be an 'open' university in the true sense of the word."
To understand the culture of the University at the time, it is important to realize that this basic, equitable belief I espoused as editor earned me numerous hate letters, including a few from the inbred "societies" of the day; in particular I remember one truly nasty missive sealed with purple wax.
But despite it all, the University was at least beginning to show some signs of social change in these final days of Shannon's presidency, and that is what mattered.
This came to abrupt halt, though, when later that year the Board of Visitors named Frank Hereford as Shannon's successor as president.
If Shannon's legacy was elevated by his response to student protests in 1970, then Hereford's was torpedoed by the protracted controversy over his refusal to resign from the (then) all-white and anti-Semitic Farmington Country Club upon becoming president.
Shannon had done so when he assumed office, but Hereford stubbornly refused to follow suit upon his ascension, thus inciting a media storm that was led by this paper's editors at the time.
Under immense pressure from numerous quarters, including his own faculty, Hereford did finally resign, but it was too late; the damage had already been done. His "good ol' boy," mint-julep image that bespoke a fraternal-elitist proclivity had been cemented for good.
It was at this point that I became cynical about the University. I felt that the battle I had waged at The Cavalier Daily for a truly open University had been forever lost. This was not a place I could return to with pride; the vestiges of the antebellum South were still too much in evidence.
As an alumnus, I became detached for many years, starting with the 11 Hereford ones. I was so disenchanted that I barely took notice of Robert O'Neil's brief five-year tenure as his successor in the mid-to-late 80s, or even of Casteen's first several years after he took up residence at Carr's Hill in 1990.
But slowly, as we approached the new millennium, I started to become cautiously hopeful of where Casteen was taking the University. I began reading about how he refused to "scale back" the University during a state financial crunch, despite being advised to do so by top government officials as well as education consultants.
A friend of mine in New Jersey several years ago stated, "Never let money stand in your way of doing what's right." And Casteen didn't. He let himself believe in the dream, and thus allowed it to come true. He quadrupled his fundraising goals and then far exceeded that revised goal. The University prospered and grew as a result of his gambit.
Risky? Yes. But taking calculated risks - especially when fueled by passion and self-confidence - is a vital component of real leadership.
Then came the cultural changes. Under Casteen, diversity became a reality, not just the hollow word that University administrators had invoked from time to time to appear politically correct.
And his creation of a 100 percent needs-met financial aid program meant that the flagship university of the commonwealth would at long last be financially accessible to all, putting an end to de facto socio-economic discrimination.
Beyond that, Casteen's globalist sensibility opened the University to the world, and its students to the cultures of foreign countries through an emphasis on international travel and study.
Many people will point to the tasteful physical growth of the University during the past two decades when citing Casteen's achievements. (As an example of the opposite, when I was an undergraduate, the bureaucrats under Shannon dealt with the escalating parking problem by installing myriad parking meters and two Pennsylvania Turnpike-style toll booths on Central Grounds.)
The buildings that went up under Casteen indeed complemented rather than compromised the University's cherished aesthetic, but that is secondary to the changes that cannot really be observed but instead must be felt.
This is the "open" University I dreamed of and wrote about for this newspaper, but never thought I would see. It is a place today where one can sense in others the drive to excel in whatever they do, as opposed to settling for mediocrity. In my day, the University was content to bring in local high school bands to perform at halftimes of football games because it did not care enough to have one of its own. I joked at the time that autumn Saturdays would be much more pleasant if we supplied the band and a high school supplied the team.
The University is a place today where one can find not only tolerance of the differences in people, but an acceptance and appreciation of those differences. It is a place that has finally come of age, and a place that I now can come back to with pride and a sense of belonging.
Unlike his predecessors - including Shannon - Casteen had a guiding macro-vision for the University specifically and for higher education in general. It is this executed vision that Sullivan has inherited, and that she hopefully treasures and will build upon during her tenure as president.
To happily invert a phrase that one of my Cavalier Daily colleagues used on these pages almost four decades ago, the University is at last as pretty of soul as of face.
Stephen Wells was the 1972-73 editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily. He currently lives in Madison, New Jersey, with his wife, two teenage sons and a dysfunctional dachshund, but is eager to relocate to Charlottesville in the near future. He has spent most of his career in the entertainment field. During the past several years has written extensively for The New York Times.
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