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Betty Castor



         


Elizabeth Bowe Castor (born May 11, 1941) is an American politician and educator who has served as Florida Education Commissioner and President of the University of South Florida. She is currently running against Republican Mel Martinez as the Democratic candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat of retiring Senator Bob Graham.

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Background

Castor was born in Glassboro, New Jersey, where her father was the mayor. She attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), earning her bachelor's degree. Castor later attended the Teachers College of Columbia University organizing a drive to help education in Uganda. Castor traveled to East Africa following her graduation in 1962, where she became a teacher. After being appointed to a diplomatic mission by President John F. Kennedy, Castor led two dozen African women and girls to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the first all-female expedition to Kilimanjaro. When Uganda became independent in 1962, Castor flew on Air Force One with Kennedy to the celebrations. Castor also played on the Ugandan national field hockey team.

While returning to the U.S. in 1965, she met Don Castor, a lawyer who worked in New York but was traveling to Miami. Later they married, settling in Dade County (now known as Miami-Dade County), where Castor was a teacher while studing for her Master of Education degree at the University of Miami. While living in Miami, Castor also gave birth to her first child.

After graduating in 1968, Castor moved to Tampa, where she became one of the founding members of the the League of Women Voters's Tampa chapter. In 1972, she was elected to the Hillsborough County Commission, becoming its chair in 1976. Later that year, Castor was elected to the Florida State Senate. She resigned and unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor in 1978, losing the primary election to Wayne Mixson and Bob Graham (who went into a runoff). Castor was reelected in 1982 and became president pro tempore of the State Senate in 1985, the first woman to hold the post.

In 1986, Castor left the State Senate again to become Florida Education Commissioner under then-Governor Bob Martinez, overseeing the state's public schools. In 1994, Castor became president of the University of South Florida.

In 1995, the FBI began requesting information on Sami Al-Arian and two other professors from USF campus police, not giving the local authorities any details on the investigation of their connections to Islamic Jihad. In 1996, USF officials received more information on the investigation, leading university president Betty Castor to suspend Al-Arian in 1996. Recordings and other information gathered for intelligence purposes was not shared with the criminal staff of the FBI in the 1990s, and the university's internal report by Tampa lawyer William Reece Smith did not suggest grounds for USF to dismiss him. It wasn't until December 19, 2001, two years after Castor left, action was taken to revoke Al-Arian's tenure and terminate his employment at the university.

Castor was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

In 1999, Castor left USF to become president of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.

Castor is currently married to former state legislator Sam Bell III. She has six children.

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Senate campaign, 2004

In the 2004 Senate campaign, Castor faced two viable Democratic candidates, Miami mayor Alex Penelas and Hollywood congressman Peter Deutsch, in the Democratic primary election.

Until the spring of 2004, Castor's fundraising was much slower than her Democratic and Republican rivals'. In the spring, the campaign hired fundraising staff from the defunct presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Bob Graham, and subsequently posted much higher fundraising numbers over the summer. Online grassroots techniques devised for the Dean campaign (Castor became a Dean Dozen candidate in August) were one contributing factor: another was the support of EMILY's List, which named Castor as its highest-rated candidate for the 2004 election cycle. The latter was a source of criticism during the August primary heat, when Deutsch accused "an out of state interest group" for "trying to buy the election," and alleged illegal collaboration between EMILY's List and the Castor campaign in their TV commercial shoots.

Castor's handling of Sami Al-Arian became another source of criticism during the campaign. In June, American Democracy Project, a 527 group founded by Bernie Friedman, began attacking Castor's handling of the incident, alleging that she had sufficient evidence to fire Al-Arian in the mid-1990s. Castor responded by stating that she never had sufficient evidence to fire Al-Arian, who was a tenured professor at the time, and by pointing out connections between ADP and the Deutsch campaign. On June 29, Senator Graham, who had previously remained outside of the Al-Arian controversy, released a statement that "Betty Castor acted appropriately as President of the University of South Florida to deal with Sami Al-Arian": later, Graham and Senator Bill Nelson brokered an agreement between the Democratic candidates to refrain from negative campaigning against each other, although this agreement appeared to break down in the final weeks of the race, when Castor and Deutsch both launched attack ads on television.

Despite these controversies, Castor won the Democratic nomination by a landslide on August 31, as most polls predicted. She is currently placed at roughly even odds with Republican nominee Mel Martinez. Some observers predict that Castor's center-left platform will prevail over Martinez's far-right platform: others believe that Martinez's support from the Bush administration and the Cuban community in Florida will help him to prevail in November.

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Positions

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