345 people have led the University of Cambridge, all of them Britons 1 Canadian is coming in to shake things up
Stephen Toope prepares for the next step in a life that has seen intellectual triumph and deep personal tragedy
After 30 years on the loftiest uplands of Canadian intellectual life, Stephen Toope still has the capacity — as all great teachers and most happy human beings do — for awe and wonder. And in his case, there’s a lot to be awed about. On Oct. 2, the legal scholar from the Munk School of Global Affairs at U of T will be installed as vice-chancellor at Cambridge University. He will be the 346th person to hold the post since the school’s founding more than 800 years ago, and the first non-Briton.
“As a West Island boy from Montreal, I feel extraordinarily privileged,” said Toope, 59, in an interview as he prepared for the move from Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood to one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions.
He said that, while he packed, he pictured Isaac Newton at Cambridge (where he had a famously inspirational encounter with a falling apple in the 17th century and discovered gravity). He has imagined the roster of geniuses to pass through before and since. And he has had to remind himself, from time to time, that “it’s not utterly crazy that I’m going there.”
While the Cambridge chancellor is a ceremonial post, the vice-chancellor is the main administrative and academic officer of the university and de facto head, nominated by the University Council and approved by the school’s Regent House to a non-renewable seven-year term.
Before choosing him, Cambridge conducted an international search led by Ian White, master of Jesus College, who said Toope “has impeccable academic credentials, a long-standing involvement with higher education, strong leadership experience and an excellent research background.”
Toope, who earned his doctorate at Cambridge in 1987, said he wasn’t even aware a search was on for a new vice-chancellor at his alma mater when he received a call from headhunters.
“It was really quite . . . stunning,” he said, pausing, uncharacteristically, to search for a word.
“I was surprised and honoured even to be considered.”
Even so, the timing wasn’t ideal.
He was only two years into an appointment as director of the Munk School, after eight years running the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he landed after serving as dean of law at McGill.
Toope had planned on spending the “next five, 10 years, whatever” at Munk, he said, especially after his wife and three children — now in their 20s and pursuing their own studies — had already suffered uprooting for the sake of his career.
“But,” he said, smiling. “It’s very hard to say no to a place like Cambridge.” When Stephen Toope was named president of UBC in 2006, Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada called him “brilliant, humane, considerate and fearless.” UBC, she said, “should be electrified.” Electrifying is not a notion that usually leaps to mind when discussing scholars. And it would be easy to suspect Abella of some hyperbole. Except that similar admiration of Toope’s talents and virtues seem to come from just about anyone who’s crossed his path.
“He sparkles,” Paul Davidson, a friend of more than 25 years and president of Universities Canada, told the Star.
“He’s gritty and grounded. He’s authentic and genuine. He is very much a 21st-century academic leader,” Davidson said. “He’s as comfortable with refugees as he is with royalty.”
Toope earned an undergraduate degree in literature and history from Harvard, degrees from McGill in common and civil law while editing the McGill Law Journal, and a PhD from Cambridge.
After articling with then chief justice Brian Dickson at the Supreme Court of Canada, he taught law at McGill, before becoming the faculty’s youngest ever dean at age 34.
As a scholar, Toope has specialized in human rights, international dispute resolution, international environmental law and the use of force. He has published articles and books on change in international law and the origins of international obligation.
He was research director of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1991, has been president of the Canadian Council on International Law, served as an observer in the first free elections in South Africa in 1994, and was founding president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, a non-partisan scholarship institute focusing on the former prime minister’s interests of social justice and Indigenous issues.
From 2002 to 2007, he served on the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. As a result of that experience, he was asked to serve as an independent fact-finder for the federal O’Connor Inquiry into the torture in Syria of Canadian Maher Arar.
As such, Toope said he has experienced “life much closer to the ground than might be assumed,” with first-hand experience of injustice, cruelty, pain. In his investigations into the tortured and disappeared, “I’ve worked with people in rural parts of Africa, rural parts of Latin America, rural parts of Asia, Southeast Asia in particular, and had to deal with people who were really suffering.”
In addition, the Cambridge recruiters likely noticed traits that suggest a large heart and sense of humour as well as a big brain, what the Brits call an allrounder.
Toope’s a good sport. At UBC, he once took up a student leader’s dare to join him as part of a fundraising effort in a duet of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) in front of a packed theatre.
The episode revealed a becoming lack of pretension, along with his background as a boy soprano in church choirs and a fondness for the arts — shared by his wife, Paula Rosen, a singer-songwriter and speech patholo- gist who is able, Toope admits, to bring him back to terra firma should he get too serious or over-impressed by his own resumé.
“These days, when there’s so much emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math, it’s nice to see somebody bring their whole selves to their academic work,” Davidson said.
And for Stephen Toope, that “whole self” also includes a deeply traumatic experience.
In1995, three youths — aged13,14 and15, later said to be high on drugs — broke into ahouse in suburban Montreal, thinking it was empty and intending on an easy score.
Inside, retired Anglican church minister Frank Toope, 75, and his wife Jocelyn, 70, were asleep in bed.
When the Toopes awoke to the noise of the intruders, they were bludgeoned to death.
The youths reportedly bragged the next day at school of their deeds. After their arrest and subsequent trial, the three were sentenced under the Young Offenders Act to a combined total of less than 15 years.
Toope was 37 and law dean at McGill when his adoptive parents were murdered. Twelve years later, he was invited to speak at graduation ceremonies in Montreal’s Dawson College — where, at the start of that academic year, a gunman had gone on a rampage, killing 18-yearold Anastasia De Sousa and injuring 20 others.
It was thought Toope might have something helpful to say to the students. He did.
“I had been raised in a loving family,” he told them. “I had been blessed with incredible educational opportunities. I had a great job as dean of law at McGill University, a wonderful wife, a lovely little daughter and a son who had just arrived.”
But on that day in 1995, three “teenage boys, who had no real motive, who had killed for fun,” tore his world apart.
There’s no single way to react to such things, he said. “I can only tell you how I reacted.
“I said no. No, you pathetic boys are not going to destroy the memory of my parents, who lived rich and gentle lives. No, you are not going to define my existence or that of my family. No, you will not turn me into a fearful person. No, you will not teach me to hate.” And they didn’t. As he looked back on that speech during an interview with the Star, Toope uses a word he often does. He considered it a “privilege” to speak to those students.
“It was a difficult moment,” he said. “But I have actually been through something that may be of relevance to these kids, who had to experience something that no students should ever have to experience.”
As Davidson sees it, the United Kingdom, possibly the world, is having something of a “Canada moment.”
When Toope arrives in the U.K., he will find Canadians as governor of the Bank of England, chief executive of the Royal Mail and the U.K.’s Information Commissioner.
And Toope’s appointment is another “example of the pretty darn impressive talent” this country has to share, Davidson said.
Not, of course, that there isn’t heavy lifting ahead.
Last year, for the first time, Cambridge did not place in the top three in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which started in 2004. In the 2016-17 list out this week, it placed fourth.
“It means Cambridge has to look at itself and see whether it’s doing as good a job as it can,” he has said.
Not least of Toope’s challenges will be the ramifications for the university sector — at an institution that draws significant research revenue from the European Union — of Brexit.
There have been concerns about a Brexit brain drain as European academics leave British universities and fears over impacts on funding, enrolment, exchange programs, teaching quality and research collaboration. It’s been estimated that European students accounted for more than 5 per cent of British university enrolment, contributing £3.7 billion to the U.K. economy and providing more than 30,000 jobs.
“I think they were very open to someone from outside the United Kingdom, partly because of the Brexit phenomenon, and their wanting to continue to send messages of openness,” Toope has said.
It also can’t have hurt his chances that his fundraising credentials are almost as impressive as his academic achievement and that at UBC he led a $1.5-billion campaign that surpassed its goal and oversaw a host of campus infrastructure improvements.
Or that a major accomplishment at Munk was to head a planning exercise to develop a modern strategic plan for the school.
Toope succeeds Prof. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, a Welsh immunologist who was paid a salary of £335,000 (about $530,000) along with a basket of other perks, including residence at the vicechancellor’s lodge, valued at £4.5 million. According to Ontario’s Sunshine List, Toope earned $310,954.44 at the Munk School last year.
Toope considers this a new “anxious age,” a time of particular risk and uncertainty across the world and for Canada in particular as American diminishment globally demands a reordering of relations.
“We won’t actually see America being great again in the way that some proponents of that phrase have indicated.”
And, to some extent, a reimagining of universities at a time when all “content” institutions face threat and upheaval.
The good news is that there’s been no hint of animosity awaiting him in Cambridge because of his untraditional origins.
“I thought there would be a moment when one or another person would say, ‘Well, why should we really be looking at you? Aren’t you some trumped-up little colonial?’ ”
But there hasn’t. Even so, Canada’s latest gift to the mother country intends to tread carefully.
“I’m not going to run in and tell them they’ve been doing everything wrong for the last 800 years. “I’d be a fool to do that.” And that’s one thing he’s not called.