John Casteen served as President of the University of Virginia 1990-2010.  The initiatives of these years included major institutional planning programs (Virginia 2020 and others); increases in the numbers of students and faculty members; construction of new buildings in Charlottesville, Wise, and elsewhere; expansion of international programs for research and for learning; increases in the University’s endowments and other non-state funds; and significant growth in the University’s stature.  In this period, also, the University was recognized for its leadership in educating minority students, for its equity programs generally, for the quality of its undergraduate teaching and programs of financial aid for students with need, and for its success in refinancing itself following historic reductions in state tax support at the beginning of the decade.

After teaching English at the University of California (Berkeley) and the University of Virginia, and service as U.Va.’s Admissions Dean, Mr. Casteen became Virginia's Secretary of Education in 1982.  He served under Gov. Charles S. Robb until 1985.  While secretary, he directed reforms in both secondary and higher education, revamped Virginia's college desegregation efforts, and initiated programs of state support for research.  From 1985 to 1990, he was president of the University of Connecticut.

Mr. Casteen’s state, national, and international service has been extensive.  He was a director of the American Council on Education, a director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, trustee and chair of the College Entrance Examination Board, commissioner of the Education Commission of the States, member of the Board of Control for the Southern Regional Education Board, commissioner of the New England Board of Higher Education, and chair of the Association of Governing Board’s council of presidents.  From 1991-1993, he chaired the National Board on Oceans and Atmosphere.  From 2005-2013, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.  He was a longtime trustee of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and of the Mariners Museum.  He was a director of the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, Virginia Intermont College, and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.

Mr. Casteen has taken special interest in colleges’ and universities’ obligations to the public generally.  He served as chair of the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and subsequently as president of SACS.  In 2000-2002, he chaired the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).  He chaired the Association of American Universities (AAU).  He served on AGB’s National Commission on College and University Board Governance and the Academy of Arts and Science’s Lincoln Project:  Excellence and Access in Public Higher Education. 

During Mr. Casteen’s years as President, U.Va. expanded its international presence and prominence in several ways.  Mr. Casteen served as chair of Universitas 21 and was a member of the Board of Directors of U21 Global Pte Ltd.  He has been a longtime trustee (previously also chair), serving as both a U.S. and an Icelandic designee, of the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation, a bilateral international trust established by the U.S. Congress and the Central Bank of Iceland to support exchange of graduate students between the U.S. and Iceland.  Appointed by President Obama, he served for six years as a trustee of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.  During those years, he chaired the screening committees for the nomination of scholars to become Woodrow Wilson Center fellows.

Mr. Casteen’s business career has included at various times service on numerous corporate boards, including Connecticut Bank and Trust Company, formerly a subsidiary of BNE, Jefferson Bankshares, the Wachovia Corporation, now part of Wells Fargo, Strayer/Strategic Education, Inc., the Altria Group, Sage Publications, and Echo360.

Mr. Casteen was named the Outstanding Virginian of 1993.  The state conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) presented its Jackson Davis Award to him in December 1993.  In 1998, he was named the University of Virginia’s outstanding alumnus of the year.  In December 1998, he received the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences.  In November 2002, Mr. Casteen was selected to be the inaugural recipient of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention’s Presidents Leadership Group Award.  The Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects awarded him its Architecture Medal for Virginia Service in 2004.  Near the end of his tenure as President, Mr. Casteen received the University of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson Award, the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Paul Goodloe McIntire Citizenship Award, and the 2010 Virginia Press Association Virginian of the Year award.  In March 2013, he received the John Hope Franklin Award from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.  In 2014, he received the Charlottesville Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Celebration Award. 

He is a Fellow of the American Council of Learning Societies and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He is an elected member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa.  In February 1996, he received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Athens (the National and Kapodistrian University).  In 2011, the University of Edinburgh made him an honorary Doctor of Philosophy.

A collection of Mr. Casteen’s short stories received the 1987 Mishima Award for fiction. In recent years, he has written extensively on public policy issues affecting universities and colleges, his articles intended primarily for trustees and presidents of colleges and universities.

Mr. Casteen retired from the University’s faculty on December 31, 2020, in the rank of a University Professor and Professor of English.  His courses after 2010 included intellectual and cultural history courses on Venice, a multiyear series of graduate seminars on governance of colleges and universities, and his academic specializations in Old English and Old Icelandic.  For several years, he taught the medieval Icelandic sagas, concentrating on the period between the settlement of Iceland from Norway (ca. 870 AD) and the collapse of Iceland’s commonwealth following a civil war in the thirteenth century.

Mr. Casteen holds three degrees in English from the University of Virginia (B.A., high honors, 1965, M.A., 1966, Ph.D., 1970).  His wife is Betsy Foote Casteen. Between them, the Casteens have five children and eleven grandchildren.