Dr. David Strangway, president of the University of B .C., is shown in the Native Long House on the university campus.
Dr. David Strangway, an esteemed geophysicist who examined moon rocks for NASA and later became a towering figure in Canadian academia, died last month at 82.
A true Renaissance man, he excelled in several spheres. He served as president at two of the country's largest universities, the University of Toronto and University of British Columbia, and later established a new undergraduate university that within years of its founding was ranked first in Canada for student engagement. He also helped design and implement the massively successful Canada Research Chairs Program, advised prime ministers and premiers, and carried priceless moon rocks – destined to be the prize exhibit for the Ontario Science Centre's 1969 grand opening – across the border in an everyday briefcase. He also helped nudge his scientific colleagues toward pro bono work in sustainable development, both in Canada and overseas.
Dr. Strangway was never one to stay at home. He was dominant in U.S. planetary geophysics at a time when that discipline dominated the world; served as director of the international Lunar Science Institute; designed geomagnetic experiments for the last four Apollo mission teams and interpreted the results; and was honoured by NASA for his scientific contributions to the U.S. space program.
His accomplishments even extended to Canada's fisheries. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien turned to him to negotiate an ecologically based international treaty that helped stabilize West Coast salmon stocks.
David William Strangway was born on June 7, 1934, in the small Ontario town of Simcoe, southwest of Hamilton. His parents were medical missionaries who returned with their infant son to Angola, where David spent his childhood. Peter Englert, current president of British Columbia's Quest University, which Dr. Strangway founded, wrote in a blog post that "Angola was always his home."
Although Angola was a fascinating place to grow up, life there was harrowing at times. Dr. Strangway once told his colleague Paul Dufour, now a fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa, how he had been afflicted with river blindness as a boy. "My parents did a lot of research on this [disease] as it was widespread in Angola," Dr. Strangway said. "I was fortunate that they recognized it and were able to get the new drugs that effectively cured it." River blindness, or onchocerciasis, is a parasitic infection transmitted by a species of black fly.
This was one of a series of medical crises the family experienced. Two years before Dr. Strangway's birth, and only a few years prior to the widespread availability of sulfonamide drugs and other antibiotics, his brother died in infancy of erysipelas, an acute dermatological staphylococcus infection. Later, his mother contracted Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague, and narrowly escaped death.
According to Dr. Englert, the south African community that nurtured young David accorded him the honorary name Cikomo; in the Umbundu dialect of the Angolan province of Bie, the name means "worker of miracles." It would prove a prophetic moniker.
Following his African secondary schooling, he returned to Canada to attend the University of Toronto and was awarded his bachelor's degree in physics and geology in 1956, followed by his master's and PhD, both in physics. He completed his studies in 1960, at the age of 26. After assistant professorships at the University of Colorado and MIT, he became chief of NASA's geophysics branch in 1970, overseeing the analysis of lunar rock samples brought home by the Apollo astronauts. (NASA had put its first two-man crew on the moon in July 1969.) In 1973 he returned to the University of Toronto as vice-president and chair of its geology department, and held both posts for a decade. When in 1983 the university's newly appointed president, Donald Forster, died suddenly from a heart attack, Dr. Strangway became president, a position he held for one year.
In 1985, Dr. Strangway began a spectacular 12-year tenure as president of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. On his watch, UBC's endowment grew by more than an order of magnitude, to more than $1.3-billion; the Chan Centre, one of North America's premier performing arts venues, was designed, built, and managed to great acclaim; and an innovative arm's-length real estate development corporation was formed to add value to underused school lands, providing housing while enriching the university. Dr. Strangway strengthened connections with established Asian universities, wooed new Asian students, and secured administrative headquarters at UBC for several of the new scientific Networks of Centres of Excellence that the federal government began to roll out in 1989.
Dr. Martha Piper, Dr. Strangway's successor at UBC, told The Canadian Press that Dr. Strangway "will go down as one of the best [university presidents] in the last 50 [or] 60 years in this country."
Dr. Strangway never finished with learning, nor with universities. After his retirement from UBC, he began to realize a long-held idea: a small, private, non-profit university with minimal internal divisions and a strong global focus, which required no public funding. The result was Quest University, which opened in 2007 in Squamish (64 kilometres north of Vancouver), with six dozen students. A decade later it has an enrolment of 700. All students live on campus; all are taught to look at the world in terms of issues and problems, not in terms of stand-alone "silo" disciplines. Dr. Englert, Quest University's current president, wrote in a Web post about Dr. Strangway's "prescience in seeing that problems of the 21st century would know no boundaries and that the increasing divisions of the 20th century were artificial. His experience leading hundreds of geophysical investigators working on lunar soil samples demonstrated that there were no clear boundaries to scientific inquiry."
Dr. Englert went on to outline the guiding principles of Quest University: "that inquiry should know no boundaries and that Quest students would tackle the challenges of the 21st century by asking their own questions – building upon each other's ideas in a liberal arts and sciences university that was both international and intimate in size."
The new school's creation was not without controversy, though. In April 1999, when the university was still in the proposal stage, a past president of the Canadian Association of University Teachers posted a jeremiad, calling Quest "a wolf in sheep's clothing," accusing Dr. Strangway of "advancing proprietary interests at the expense of civic values, liberal education, and transparently public universities."
It also said, "Dr. Strangway would be better off working for the welfare of the public system from which he has long benefited." Dr. Strangway chose to ignore such snipes, and his new university has since operated to great acclaim. The 2011 National Survey of Student Engagement placed Quest University first in Canada for undergraduate educational quality.
With Quest planning under way, Dr. Strangway moved on to become president of the Ottawa-based Canada Foundation for Innovation, dispensing more than $2.7-billion to Canadian research and development infrastructure during his tenure, from 1998 to 2004.
He was also at various times a member of the B.C. Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology; a founding board member of the International Institute for Sustainable Development; chairman of the Ontario Geoscience Research Fund; a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Planetary Exploration; a member of the development board of the American Geophysical Union; and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1972 and invested as an officer of the Order of Canada in 1997.
Dr. Strangway maintained ties to his beloved Africa, backing initiatives to enhance the continent's indigenous capabilities in science, technology, engineering and medicine. His strategic aim was to reduce Africa's dependence on foreign aid.
"David's ties to Africa and Angola were deep and he travelled extensively to the continent building support for one of his key ideas: joint research chairs," Dr. Dufour recalls. "We spent considerable time working with various organizations to help set up a research chairs program. … While David was a great institution-builder here in Canada, he never forgot his roots and wanted to give back in helping build knowledge capacity in Africa."
Dr. Englert offered this simple summary: "The scope of David Strangway's vision was the globe."
Dr. Strangway died of heart failure on Dec. 13 in Kelowna, B.C. He leaves his wife, Alice Gow; children, Richard, Susan and Patricia; five grandchildren; and younger brother, Dr. Donald Strangway.