UVa’s Casteen roasted by local MS chapter

John T. Casteen III grinned and listened Tuesday evening as colleagues roasted his tenure as president of the University of Virginia during a dinner hosted by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Casteen, on hand to receive the Silver Hope Award, was one roughly 250 people gathered at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society Blue Ridge Chapter’s annual fundraiser.

And while the award recognized Casteen’s contributions to the Charlottesville community, it was also accompanied by the fundraiser’s traditional tongue lashing.
Among those fueling the fire were Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger, UVa political guru Larry J. Sabato and former NCAA President Gene Corrigan.
“Our alumni were extremely grateful to John for supporting our bid for the ACC membership,” Steger said. “In fact, I had to kind of deal with this problem: There was a fundraising effort started to put a statue of John at Lane Stadium. ... But in his typical modest fashion, John declined this honor.”

Corrigan, the self-described “resident jock” of the evening, was the next to tee off.
“How do you roast him, he doesn’t seem roastable,” Corrigan began. “One of the longest serving, and most successful collegiate presidents in the United States, a man who has raised millions, hundreds of millions, of dollars for his university, a man who, if you’re talking to him and you’re standing on his left side, has probably not heard a damn word you’ve said ... but who will smile and nod his head as if you have passed on to him the secrets of life everlasting.”
On a more serious note, Sabato, undoubtedly the most oft-quoted person in the room, took at jab at the Virginia legislature for cutting higher education funding, but praised Casteen for deft fundraising.
“Thanks to you we have the margin of excellence,” Sabato said. “Thanks to you almost everything at the University of Virginia is better, and prouder, and stronger, than when you joined the University of Virginia all those years ago.”
In his rebuttal, Casteen said he expected worse from the panel, which he called “three of my favorite friends.”
“I was told they were really going to rip me apart,” Casteen, in his 19th year as president, said. “This was like ‘Good morning’ [when fighting for funding] at the General Assembly.”

And then he took a shot at Steger.
“Charles doesn’t normally come to Charlottesville without his football team,” he said. “It’s a mark of uncommon bravery that he’s come tonight with everybody else.”
Among Casteen’s accomplishments cited by the speakers as reasons he was receiving the Silver Hope Award was the president’s establishment of AccessUVa, a financial-aid program aimed at helping low-income students pay for college without accruing mountains of debt.
Since 1992 the MS dinner has raised more than $2 million for everything from funding MS research to supplying patients with gas cards to reach doctors’ appointments, officials said.

“It’s always more fun sitting in the audience than sitting up [on stage],” Jim Haden, president of Martha Jefferson Hospital and 2007 Silver Hope recipient, said. “Two years later and I’m still singed.”
Haden, along with other past recipients, comprised the panel that selected Casteen for the Silver Hope Award, the MS Society’s highest honor, this year.
According to Fay Painter, president of the Charlottesville-based Blue Ridge Chapter, this year’s dinner raised more than $165,000, up roughly $22,000 from 2008.
Painter added that the current economic crisis has doubled the number of assistance requests the group, which serves 3,000 MS patients in 51 counties in Central and Western Virginia, has received during the last several months.