With his last day of office slated for July 31, was outgoing University of Virginia President John Casteen being a tad rough on himself during his final State of the University Address? It depends on who you ask.
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After previous plans for a music hall were put on hold, Cavalier Marching Band Director Bill Pease says his band’s new rehearsal hall, planned to open in 2011, will put UVA “in an elite group of marching band programs.” |
After sharing a wealth of successes—among them, a $3 billion capital campaign only nine days off schedule and new buildings that account for roughly 42 percent of UVA’s gross square footage—Casteen brought up “missed opportunities.” The list includes curriculum reforms in foreign languages and mathematics, the lack of a major concert hall, planning mistakes surrounding UVA’s shelved Arts Gateway project and meeting science initiatives as part of the University’s Virginia 2020 plan.
“We have requested more faculty lines every year in the last years,” says María-Inés Lagos, chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, via e-mail. “Since 2002 we have hired one Assistant Professor in Spanish linguistics and one Assistant Professor in a joint appointment with American Studies.” In 2008, a chance to hire two new faculty members was lost due to UVA’s hiring freeze, says Lagos.
And while more than 50 faculty-led study-abroad programs were created during Casteen’s presidency, Lagos says that more students could benefit from pairing cultural competency with linguistic competency.
“At present, universities are left with the task of doing what should have been done in K-12,” says Lagos. “Clearly, UVA students need greater and more intense exposure to languages and cultures in order to compete in a globalized world.”
Former UVA Art Museum director Jill Hartz, now executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, agrees with Casteen’s assessment of the Arts Gateway. “I’m in a museum now that has everything that we had hoped to have at the UVA Art Museum,” she says. “It’s over 70,000 square feet, it has a covered loading dock, it has all the things a museum really needs…So, while I’m thrilled to have it, I’m really disappointed that we couldn’t get it done there.”
Hartz said that incoming UVA president Teresa Sullivan should bring an interesting perspective on the UVA Art Museum. During Sullivan’s time at the University of Michigan, the school completed a $42 million renovation and expansion of its art museum. Last June, UVA Vice Provost for the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner shared her hope to expand the museum’s home, the Bayly building, by an additional 17,000 square feet—an 88 percent increase in programming space.
John Bean, a professor in the School for Engineering and Applied Science and a member of the Virginia 2020 Science and Technology commission, says UVA is behind on 2020 science initiatives because of the cost that being a top-notch science department entails.
“If you say ‘I want X number of number one departments,’ it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to do it in humanities than it is in science and engineering,” he says. The Science and Technology commission was encouraged to think big—“including in the multi-hundred-million-dollar category,” says Bean—and incremental steps towards a stronger department may be “more plausible.”
The other missed opportunities? While Casteen said curriculum reforms could create “vigorous” math programming for science careers, math department chair Don Ramirez says that 79 bachelor’s degrees were awarded last year—“an increase of 13 undergraduate mathematics majors over last year,” he tells C-VILLE.
And sometimes opportunity knocks twice: UVA won’t be without a concert hall for much longer. After longtime UVA donor Hunter Smith withdrew a $22 million gift for the Arts Gateway for not starting construction in 2005, she promised a gift of $10.7 million to fund a 12,900-square foot rehearsal hall for use by the UVA Music Department, with construction slated to finish by the summer of 2011.
“This will put us in an elite group of marching band programs around the country to have a building like this,” Cavalier Marching Band director Bill Pease told C-VILLE via e-mail. The new facility will provide coverage against rough weather and instrument storage space to lighten the load carried by band members—both things that Pease seems happy to have waited for.
“We are all so lucky to be here at UVA,” he says. “This is heaven on earth to me as a band director.”
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