Stephen Toope

Duration: 35 mins 57 secs

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Description:	Interview of Stephen Toope by Alan Macfarlane on 26th September 2022, transcript by Sarah Harrison


Created:	2022-10-26 11:39
Collection:	Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Publisher:	University of Cambridge
Copyright:	Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language:	eng (English)


Abstract:	Interview of Stephen Toope by Alan Macfarlane 26th September 2022 00:00:00 Born in Montreal, Canada, on 14th February 1958, a Valentine's Day baby; it is important for me to say that I'm adopted so I only knew my adoptive parents on one side of my family; my adoptive mother's parents had died before I was born, but my adoptive grandparents, my father's parents, were from Newfoundland; they grew up in a very small village called Trinity, on Trinity Bay; we used to visit them in summer for many years, driving across Newfoundland which then had only unpaved roads for 500 miles - it was quite something; so I got to know them quite well; my grandmother's family was from Jersey and her name was DeGreche; I have never been to Jersey, but am about to go for the first time ever; I didn't know my grandfather very well because he died when I was quite young but I do remember him as being a person of great dignity; he was a carpenter and by all accounts a very good carpenter; my grandmother was a rather tough woman, rather harsh and full of judgement, quite strongly Anglican, and my father later became an Anglican Priest 2:11:22 I am serenely untroubled by being adopted; my parents were absolutely wonderful people; I was adopted as a baby, and I always knew from any time of cognisance that I was adopted, and it simply wasn't an issue for me at all; I thought of my parents as my parents, and that was the end of the story; my father as I said became an Anglican Priest; he grew up in this village which was really a fishing village on the coast; at sixteen he became a schoolteacher, there was no training required, and he was obviously capable of teaching at a very basic level; then he began to think that he might have a vocation in the Priesthood; he did a little bit of training in Newfoundland, but there was really no Theological College, there was no University at the time in Newfoundland; it was before it joined in confederation with Canada, so he ended up coming to study at Bishop's University in Quebec; it was there, through his brother who was working at a shipyard in Quebec, that my father met my mother who was the niece of my uncle's wife; so it was rather complicated as she was both my mother's aunt and sister-in-law; in any event, they met and ended up getting married; then they were immediately posted back to Newfoundland; my mother had really never been outside Montreal; she had a modest background; her father was a tool and dye maker and worked for Marconi Corporation until he died very young, having been gassed in the First World War, never having robust health after that; I think it was a real shock for my mother when they moved to Newfoundland; not only were they in this rather small and very rural province, but they were actually posted to a very small island off the north coast of Newfoundland called Change Islands, my mother never having been outside a big city in her life before; but they made do and I think they made friends, and I think they always remembered that as a really important formative experience; my father had committed to going back to Newfoundland for some time as I think the Diocese had helped pay for his education; ultimately they came back to Montreal and then my father's whole career was in and around the Diocese of Montreal 5:28:16 My parents influenced me in so many ways; firstly they had tremendous integrity; they were warm and of gentle spirit, particularly my mother; she worked as a parish secretary for much of her life; they were very kind people, committed to the parish and the community; right from the very beginning I was expected to participate in activities with adults, I was never kept away; I was in a choir when young and very involved in the church myself, and I think that I just grew up with the sense that one participated actively in the community; I would also say that my parents were very interested in just making the world a better place, if I may put it as directly as that; everything they did was really about trying to improve social circumstances; I would say that my father grew up in the Anglo-Catholic leftist circle, an interesting grouping that was always influential in his life; my mother was less interested in politics per se, but very interested in the community 7:01:10 I am terrible about going back to very early days but a memory that was particularly salient for me and still has an implication in the way I think about the world; I'll go right to grade 5, which is a long way into school, about the age of ten; I was about to go into that grade level when I heard that I was going into the class of a Mrs Baldwin; she had a reputation for being a dragon, and I remember the entire summer before I went into that grade being absolutely distraught; needless to say when I got into grade 5 and started to get to know Mrs Baldwin she was extraordinary, a really great teacher; demanding, I suppose that was where her reputation came from, but fundamentally committed; if one was a good student she would help you make good progress; I learnt from that that you should never rely on other people's judgements of people, you have to make your own assessments 8:51:06 My secondary school was a public high school in a suburb of Montreal called Beaconsfield High School; actually it was a very good school; when I was there it was rated as the third best state school in Canada so I was very lucky; I had really superb teachers from grade 7, aged thirteen, right through to the end of high school; in every year I had excellent teachers to push me, they were creative, and it was a very forward-thinking school which gave a lot of self-direction and freedom to design one's own programme, within structure of course; I had a whole series of teachers who had a big impact on my life; one I must single out was a man named John Whitman who was my grade 10 North-American Literature teacher; then in grade 11, which was the final year in Quebec, he was my theatre teacher and I also did a lot of acting and he was the principle director; in North-American Literature he completely engaged me with great writers from Hawthorn to T.S. Eliot who was called North-American in this context; it really had a huge impact on my life and actually affected the choices I made for university; but it was in the theatre that the biggest difference was made; he challenged so forcefully, and the quality of these productions, the expectation for young high school based actors was really high; I think it set me up for life in many ways; we did a wide range of plays; the most famous would be “Romeo and Juliet” in which I was Friar Lawrence; I actually loved the part, partly because the director, John Whitman, felt that he was a truly pivotal character and perhaps had been under-rated in the play which was why he cast me; so he actually made the part in some ways more impressive than it often is in productions, and I loved the experience; I also did a play called “Story Theatre” which was really about fairy tales and was really fun, so a wide variety of things over the years. 11:43:05 I think that as a professor, obviously having to “profess” and be in front of groups for a long time, having acting experience, just the knowledge of how to project well, how to hold oneself, how to sense the reaction in front of you, I think has been extremely helpful in my professorial career; roles bring certain types of expectation; just the other day I was called upon to announce the accession of King Charles III from the steps of Senate House, and there is no doubt that my acting experience was absolutely crucial to that job; in that school there were so many good teachers; in grade 9 I had a Mr Stephens, an English teacher, and what was so wonderful about him was that he had a system whereby you could choose to go ahead of the curriculum if you were capable; so two or three of us in the class just did more and more, and he would encourage and create opportunities for you to do extra work but he was engaged with it; he helped shape the work, encourage but also criticise you; it was a wonderful experience because it allowed those who chose to do so to move forward much more quickly and expand your horizons 13:52:05 As I mentioned, I was always involved with the church because of my parents' engagement; more particularly I was a singer so I was a boy soprano, and throughout my early years from about seven onwards I sang, and it was very important to me; the moment of Confirmation, I think I was thirteen when that happened, really was a continuation, it wasn't a fundamental shift for me; I remember it being a meaningful moment; it is rather odd because it was a time of great population expansion in Canada and I was in the largest class of confirmands that my church had ever seen; I think there were eighty-three of us getting Confirmed at the same time; I knew the Bishop because of my father, and I liked him very much, Bishop Kenneth McGuire, so it was a meaningful experience; then I continued as a singer and as my voice changed I became a baritone, so I remained very much a part of the fabric of the church; later I became much more active in other ways; I have absolutely remained an Anglican Christian and for many years I chaired various committees for the Anglican Church of Canada, the Primate’s Rural World Relief and Development Fund, the Anglican Church of Canada's international engagements, and I was also a member of the Anglican Consultative Council representing Canadian Anglicans for nine years I guess 16:04:06 I was always interested in politics, even from an earlier age, partly because my father was interested in politics; he was a news-hound and really spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in the world; so we always had conversations at the dinner table about political issues; as I mentioned, I should say my father came up through a part of the church which was represented by a connection to social causes, even though he was an Anglo-Catholic; he was left-wing in a moderate way, but he believed in social justice, the desire to have greater equality in society; part of that came from his background as a Newfoundlander because Newfoundland was in many ways run by family compacts in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and there was a real sense of social division between the haves and have nots; he grew up as a have not, not in great poverty but certainly not being privileged in any way, and I think it had a big impact on his political sensibilities; I would describe myself as a radical centrist, I really am; I'm very pragmatic I would say in my politics, and I'm very interested in trying to find mechanism that actually improve people's lives broadly rather than mechanisms that create further inequality, in that I think I share that sense with my father; trying to find economic and social means through policy that actually improves the lot of the vast majority of people is where I think politics should be 18:23:12 On the subject of university, I have to go back to John Whitman, my drama teacher; when I was graduating in Quebec at the time there was a new system where you went through eleven years of high school then two years of a kind of community college which was called cégep in French; I wasn't convinced that this new system was going to work well for me because it felt like just an elongation of high school experience, and didn't seem like it was going to be very challenging; I wanted to try and find a mechanism to avoid that and there were only a couple of universities in Canada who would admit people directly from high school in Quebec without having gone through this community college; I went to investigate one of those universities and I wasn't very inspired, so John Whitman said “why don't you go to Harvard?”; I was taken aback as I had never thought of Harvard, and my family couldn't afford me going to an American university, much less Harvard which was very expensive at the time; Whitman told me to apply and see what happens, and that he really thought I could do it; I did apply, past the admission deadline, which today would have been the end of the story; but at that time there was more flexibility and I was called a couple of weeks later by the Director of Admissions at Harvard whose name was L. Fred Jewett; Fred Jewett said “We really would like you to come here”, and he happened to be in charge of Canadian admissions; then he asked if it was necessary for me to have financial support to come; I told him that unfortunately my parents couldn't afford to send me; a couple of weeks later he called and said I had a full scholarship and would I come; so I ended up going to Harvard which was a great experience and again set me on a trajectory, much like drama, that shaped a lot of the rest of my life; I did English history and literature; I was very lucky; you enter Harvard in no programme originally so in your freshman year you get to explore, which is an interesting opportunity; I then had to apply into a very special programme called the Committee Granting Degrees in History and Literature; it was a tiny programme and I was accepted into it and it was fabulous because it gave you immediate access to tutorials, very similar to the tutorials or supervisions that we would have here at Cambridge; a very small group and then access to the top professors; in my case sometimes two or three to one and sometimes two tutors, one in history, one in literature, working together; it was a great experience and also connected me with some very eminent professors in the early stage of my career, very inspiring; I will mention two; one was a visiting professor from Yale named Edward Mendelson who is the literary executor of Auden, and he was at the time relatively young, I think he was an associate professor, and he taught modernist literature; here there is a continuity from that North-American Literature class of John Whitman's to this class with Edward Mendelson; so I had already thought about some of the issues and themes that were important, but Mendelson was just a brilliant professor and really engaged me in deep thinking around modernist writing – Pound, Auden, Eliot, Virginia Woolf etc; so that was fabulous; the other person I must single out was Wallace MacCaffrey who was a Tudor historian and the Chair of the Department of History; in this programme at Harvard one wrote a dissertation/thesis in the last year, and he became my supervisor even though I wasn't doing Tudor history; I did work on eighteenth century forest communities in Nottinghamshire and he supervised the work and was just wonderful, a really encouraging, rigorous but supportive supervisor, and I learnt a lot from that; I was influenced by E.P. Thompson; when I was in my second year at Harvard, in those tutorials that I mentioned, I read quite a lot of E.P. Thompson – 'Making of the English Working Class', 'Whigs and Hunters', and it was 'Whigs and Hunters' that started me thinking about what I later discovered was legal history; I was thinking of it as social history but it really engaged me as legal history, and its what started me on the path to law ultimately although I didn't know it at the time 24:48:11 When I was at Harvard I had a fundamental decision to make; I continued acting there and did a lot of theatre, and I had to decide whether to continue in theatre as a career which some of my colleagues did, or whether to do a Ph.D in history which I was quite keen on doing or to think about studying law; I decided that I probably wasn't gifted enough to be a professional actor; I thought about history very strongly but I ultimately decided that I had become really intrigued by the functioning of law, how it works as a discipline, how it works within society, and so I chose to go to law and I went law school back in Canada because at that moment I didn't want to disengage myself from the Canadian context; I applied only to one law school which was Mcgill because it had a programme in both the Common law and the Civil law, Canada having both those systems, Quebec and the rest of the country; that turned out to be a fabulous choice for me; it was a very supportive faculty, very collegial and really fundamentally interested in comparative law and international law; that was what I knew I was most interested in, and that goes back to earlier days, believe it or not, in my high school year book I said I wanted to be an international lawyer, and that is actually what happened, with those digressions through my education 26:45:04 It was a four year programme in Law because it was two different degrees in Common law and Civil law; that was after four years at Harvard so I had already studied for eight years, and I wanted to do a Ph.D at that point because I knew then that I wanted to teach law, not to become a practising lawyer although I have done a lot of advising over the years; I wanted to go to a place that was really outstanding for International Law and to have a supervisor that I thought I would really respect; that was Cambridge and Sir Derek Bowett; I was very fortunate; I applied to various scholarships because, again, I couldn't have afforded to come here if I hadn't been on a scholarship; I was granted a Commonwealth Scholarship and I wrote to Sir Derek asking if he'd be prepared to supervise me; he very quickly wrote back and said he would be delighted to do so, assuming I was admitted; so I knew right from the beginning even though the system was not registered for any degree when I first arrived, I then went on and I worked with him on International Arbitration between States and Private Parties; it was a wholly positive experience, he was a superb supervisor, challenging, totally reliable, and it is one of the things I learnt from him, he handed things back almost days after receiving them; I've tried to model myself as a supervisor on him; then when I finished with that I was very fortunate to be chosen as a Law Clerk in the Supreme Court of Canada, working for the Chief Justice of Canada, then at a crucial moment in Canadian legal history; the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms had just been promulgated and so all of the early cases were being decided under the Charter and my boss, the Chief Justice, was really one of the two leading members of the Court in setting a framework for Canadian law which persists to this day; it was an enormous privilege to be working at that time on all of those really fundamental issues; then I was very fortunate to be hired to become a Law professor at McGill University where I had studied, and I was there for fifteen years teaching International Law and some other areas of law 29:34:14 On administration as Vice-Chancellor, in many ways I didn't choose that path; what happened was that at McGill there happened to be a generational gap; there had been a weak hiring for a period so there was a great cohort of senior people, then a less strong cohort of mid-career people, then a cohort of quite engaged and, may I say, talented people at the next generation; so what happened was I was asked to become Dean at McGill when I was thirty-two, so I was very young, I was only an Associate Professor, and I was very unsure about doing that; but I was prevailed upon to take on that role; I did it, and happily it went well and accomplished some quite important things for the University and the Faculty; that set me on a path that I had not really chosen; I'd never imagined that I would want to be University President or Vice-Chancellor, it was not on my radar screen so to speak; I'd always imagined my career as being primarily about international law; but then after I stepped down I was invited to be President of a foundation, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, a wonderful foundation, well endowed, and from that I was head-hunted to be the President of the University of British Columbia and that was a fundamental choice at that moment, both moving to British Columbia, a very different part of Canada, and then deciding that I would indeed be willing to take on a university Presidency; I talked with a lot of people, got lots of advice, and ultimately decided I would do it; but it was by no means a career choice that I made at an early stage 32:03:02 On Cambridge, I will speak of things I would cherish; one is clearly all the work that has been done across the University addressing the issue of access and participation for traditionally excluded groups; so student from black communities, from Pakistani, Bangladeshi communities, white working-class boys – there are a number of communities that just haven't been coming to Cambridge even though there are talented people in those communities; and I have been really inspired by work that has been done across the University to address those gaps; the foundation year, new scholarship opportunities, Cambridge Bursary programme etc.; another thing that I will cherish is simply the fundamental commitment to truly excellent work at a globally sophisticated level; I got to travel – pre-Covid – across the University & seeing people in physics, in anthropology, in sociology, in chemistry, operating at the highest levels of achievement and influence is just remarkable, and I think this is a university that has succeeded generation after generation in encouraging and supporting that level of work, and that's something truly to cherish 33:50:07 Now, most importantly, I will be moving closer to my family; the Covid years quite honestly took a toll in really feeling frustratedly disconnected from children and grandchildren; so I am moving to a city in Toronto where every single member of my family happens now to live just by accident, so that will be wonderful; and I shall be heading up the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research which is a wonderful organisation, a global organisation focussed on building networks to address some of the hardest challenges facing science and humanity, so anti-microbial resistance to economic inequality, and bringing together top people, Nobel Laureates and comparable people, to address those issues across disciplines and across geographies, so I'm really excited about that. [Reading from 'Second Farewell to Cambridge' by Xu Zhimo, translated by Yao Liang, Choo Liang and Mick Le Moignan]

Abstract:

Interview of Stephen Toope by Alan Macfarlane 26th September 2022

00:00:00 Born in Montreal, Canada, on 14th February 1958, a Valentine's Day baby; it is important for me to say that I'm adopted so I only knew my adoptive parents on one side of my family; my adoptive mother's parents had died before I was born, but my adoptive grandparents, my father's parents, were from Newfoundland; they grew up in a very small village called Trinity, on Trinity Bay; we used to visit them in summer for many years, driving across Newfoundland which then had only unpaved roads for 500 miles - it was quite something; so I got to know them quite well; my grandmother's family was from Jersey and her name was DeGreche; I have never been to Jersey, but am about to go for the first time ever; I didn't know my grandfather very well because he died when I was quite young but I do remember him as being a person of great dignity; he was a carpenter and by all accounts a very good carpenter; my grandmother was a rather tough woman, rather harsh and full of judgement, quite strongly Anglican, and my father later became an Anglican Priest

2:11:22 I am serenely untroubled by being adopted; my parents were absolutely wonderful people; I was adopted as a baby, and I always knew from any time of cognisance that I was adopted, and it simply wasn't an issue for me at all; I thought of my parents as my parents, and that was the end of the story; my father as I said became an Anglican Priest; he grew up in this village which was really a fishing village on the coast; at sixteen he became a schoolteacher, there was no training required, and he was obviously capable of teaching at a very basic level; then he began to think that he might have a vocation in the Priesthood; he did a little bit of training in Newfoundland, but there was really no Theological College, there was no University at the time in Newfoundland; it was before it joined in confederation with Canada, so he ended up coming to study at Bishop's University in Quebec; it was there, through his brother who was working at a shipyard in Quebec, that my father met my mother who was the niece of my uncle's wife; so it was rather complicated as she was both my mother's aunt and sister-in-law; in any event, they met and ended up getting married; then they were immediately posted back to Newfoundland; my mother had really never been outside Montreal; she had a modest background; her father was a tool and dye maker and worked for Marconi Corporation until he died very young, having been gassed in the First World War, never having robust health after that; I think it was a real shock for my mother when they moved to Newfoundland; not only were they in this rather small and very rural province, but they were actually posted to a very small island off the north coast of Newfoundland called Change Islands, my mother never having been outside a big city in her life before; but they made do and I think they made friends, and I think they always remembered that as a really important formative experience; my father had committed to going back to Newfoundland for some time as I think the Diocese had helped pay for his education; ultimately they came back to Montreal and then my father's whole career was in and around the Diocese of Montreal

5:28:16 My parents influenced me in so many ways; firstly they had tremendous integrity; they were warm and of gentle spirit, particularly my mother; she worked as a parish secretary for much of her life; they were very kind people, committed to the parish and the community; right from the very beginning I was expected to participate in activities with adults, I was never kept away; I was in a choir when young and very involved in the church myself, and I think that I just grew up with the sense that one participated actively in the community; I would also say that my parents were very interested in just making the world a better place, if I may put it as directly as that; everything they did was really about trying to improve social circumstances; I would say that my father grew up in the Anglo-Catholic leftist circle, an interesting grouping that was always influential in his life; my mother was less interested in politics per se, but very interested in the community

7:01:10 I am terrible about going back to very early days but a memory that was particularly salient for me and still has an implication in the way I think about the world; I'll go right to grade 5, which is a long way into school, about the age of ten; I was about to go into that grade level when I heard that I was going into the class of a Mrs Baldwin; she had a reputation for being a dragon, and I remember the entire summer before I went into that grade being absolutely distraught; needless to say when I got into grade 5 and started to get to know Mrs Baldwin she was extraordinary, a really great teacher; demanding, I suppose that was where her reputation came from, but fundamentally committed; if one was a good student she would help you make good progress; I learnt from that that you should never rely on other people's judgements of people, you have to make your own assessments

8:51:06 My secondary school was a public high school in a suburb of Montreal called Beaconsfield High School; actually it was a very good school; when I was there it was rated as the third best state school in Canada so I was very lucky; I had really superb teachers from grade 7, aged thirteen, right through to the end of high school; in every year I had excellent teachers to push me, they were creative, and it was a very forward-thinking school which gave a lot of self-direction and freedom to design one's own programme, within structure of course; I had a whole series of teachers who had a big impact on my life; one I must single out was a man named John Whitman who was my grade 10 North-American Literature teacher; then in grade 11, which was the final year in Quebec, he was my theatre teacher and I also did a lot of acting and he was the principle director; in North-American Literature he completely engaged me with great writers from Hawthorn to T.S. Eliot who was called North-American in this context; it really had a huge impact on my life and actually affected the choices I made for university; but it was in the theatre that the biggest difference was made; he challenged so forcefully, and the quality of these productions, the expectation for young high school based actors was really high; I think it set me up for life in many ways; we did a wide range of plays; the most famous would be “Romeo and Juliet” in which I was Friar Lawrence; I actually loved the part, partly because the director, John Whitman, felt that he was a truly pivotal character and perhaps had been under-rated in the play which was why he cast me; so he actually made the part in some ways more impressive than it often is in productions, and I loved the experience; I also did a play called “Story Theatre” which was really about fairy tales and was really fun, so a wide variety of things over the years.

11:43:05 I think that as a professor, obviously having to “profess” and be in front of groups for a long time, having acting experience, just the knowledge of how to project well, how to hold oneself, how to sense the reaction in front of you, I think has been extremely helpful in my professorial career; roles bring certain types of expectation; just the other day I was called upon to announce the accession of King Charles III from the steps of Senate House, and there is no doubt that my acting experience was absolutely crucial to that job; in that school there were so many good teachers; in grade 9 I had a Mr Stephens, an English teacher, and what was so wonderful about him was that he had a system whereby you could choose to go ahead of the curriculum if you were capable; so two or three of us in the class just did more and more, and he would encourage and create opportunities for you to do extra work but he was engaged with it; he helped shape the work, encourage but also criticise you; it was a wonderful experience because it allowed those who chose to do so to move forward much more quickly and expand your horizons

13:52:05 As I mentioned, I was always involved with the church because of my parents' engagement; more particularly I was a singer so I was a boy soprano, and throughout my early years from about seven onwards I sang, and it was very important to me; the moment of Confirmation, I think I was thirteen when that happened, really was a continuation, it wasn't a fundamental shift for me; I remember it being a meaningful moment; it is rather odd because it was a time of great population expansion in Canada and I was in the largest class of confirmands that my church had ever seen; I think there were eighty-three of us getting Confirmed at the same time; I knew the Bishop because of my father, and I liked him very much, Bishop Kenneth McGuire, so it was a meaningful experience; then I continued as a singer and as my voice changed I became a baritone, so I remained very much a part of the fabric of the church; later I became much more active in other ways; I have absolutely remained an Anglican Christian and for many years I chaired various committees for the Anglican Church of Canada, the Primate’s Rural World Relief and Development Fund, the Anglican Church of Canada's international engagements, and I was also a member of the Anglican Consultative Council representing Canadian Anglicans for nine years I guess

16:04:06 I was always interested in politics, even from an earlier age, partly because my father was interested in politics; he was a news-hound and really spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in the world; so we always had conversations at the dinner table about political issues; as I mentioned, I should say my father came up through a part of the church which was represented by a connection to social causes, even though he was an Anglo-Catholic; he was left-wing in a moderate way, but he believed in social justice, the desire to have greater equality in society; part of that came from his background as a Newfoundlander because Newfoundland was in many ways run by family compacts in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and there was a real sense of social division between the haves and have nots; he grew up as a have not, not in great poverty but certainly not being privileged in any way, and I think it had a big impact on his political sensibilities; I would describe myself as a radical centrist, I really am; I'm very pragmatic I would say in my politics, and I'm very interested in trying to find mechanism that actually improve people's lives broadly rather than mechanisms that create further inequality, in that I think I share that sense with my father; trying to find economic and social means through policy that actually improves the lot of the vast majority of people is where I think politics should be

18:23:12 On the subject of university, I have to go back to John Whitman, my drama teacher; when I was graduating in Quebec at the time there was a new system where you went through eleven years of high school then two years of a kind of community college which was called cégep in French; I wasn't convinced that this new system was going to work well for me because it felt like just an elongation of high school experience, and didn't seem like it was going to be very challenging; I wanted to try and find a mechanism to avoid that and there were only a couple of universities in Canada who would admit people directly from high school in Quebec without having gone through this community college; I went to investigate one of those universities and I wasn't very inspired, so John Whitman said “why don't you go to Harvard?”; I was taken aback as I had never thought of Harvard, and my family couldn't afford me going to an American university, much less Harvard which was very expensive at the time; Whitman told me to apply and see what happens, and that he really thought I could do it; I did apply, past the admission deadline, which today would have been the end of the story; but at that time there was more flexibility and I was called a couple of weeks later by the Director of Admissions at Harvard whose name was L. Fred Jewett; Fred Jewett said “We really would like you to come here”, and he happened to be in charge of Canadian admissions; then he asked if it was necessary for me to have financial support to come; I told him that unfortunately my parents couldn't afford to send me; a couple of weeks later he called and said I had a full scholarship and would I come; so I ended up going to Harvard which was a great experience and again set me on a trajectory, much like drama, that shaped a lot of the rest of my life; I did English history and literature; I was very lucky; you enter Harvard in no programme originally so in your freshman year you get to explore, which is an interesting opportunity; I then had to apply into a very special programme called the Committee Granting Degrees in History and Literature; it was a tiny programme and I was accepted into it and it was fabulous because it gave you immediate access to tutorials, very similar to the tutorials or supervisions that we would have here at Cambridge; a very small group and then access to the top professors; in my case sometimes two or three to one and sometimes two tutors, one in history, one in literature, working together; it was a great experience and also connected me with some very eminent professors in the early stage of my career, very inspiring; I will mention two; one was a visiting professor from Yale named Edward Mendelson who is the literary executor of Auden, and he was at the time relatively young, I think he was an associate professor, and he taught modernist literature; here there is a continuity from that North-American Literature class of John Whitman's to this class with Edward Mendelson; so I had already thought about some of the issues and themes that were important, but Mendelson was just a brilliant professor and really engaged me in deep thinking around modernist writing – Pound, Auden, Eliot, Virginia Woolf etc; so that was fabulous; the other person I must single out was Wallace MacCaffrey who was a Tudor historian and the Chair of the Department of History; in this programme at Harvard one wrote a dissertation/thesis in the last year, and he became my supervisor even though I wasn't doing Tudor history; I did work on eighteenth century forest communities in Nottinghamshire and he supervised the work and was just wonderful, a really encouraging, rigorous but supportive supervisor, and I learnt a lot from that;
I was influenced by E.P. Thompson; when I was in my second year at Harvard, in those tutorials that I mentioned, I read quite a lot of E.P. Thompson – 'Making of the English Working Class', 'Whigs and Hunters', and it was 'Whigs and Hunters' that started me thinking about what I later discovered was legal history; I was thinking of it as social history but it really engaged me as legal history, and its what started me on the path to law ultimately although I didn't know it at the time

24:48:11 When I was at Harvard I had a fundamental decision to make; I continued acting there and did a lot of theatre, and I had to decide whether to continue in theatre as a career which some of my colleagues did, or whether to do a Ph.D in history which I was quite keen on doing or to think about studying law; I decided that I probably wasn't gifted enough to be a professional actor; I thought about history very strongly but I ultimately decided that I had become really intrigued by the functioning of law, how it works as a discipline, how it works within society, and so I chose to go to law and I went law school back in Canada because at that moment I didn't want to disengage myself from the Canadian context; I applied only to one law school which was Mcgill because it had a programme in both the Common law and the Civil law, Canada having both those systems, Quebec and the rest of the country; that turned out to be a fabulous choice for me; it was a very supportive faculty, very collegial and really fundamentally interested in comparative law and international law; that was what I knew I was most interested in, and that goes back to earlier days, believe it or not, in my high school year book I said I wanted to be an international lawyer, and that is actually what happened, with those digressions through my education

26:45:04 It was a four year programme in Law because it was two different degrees in Common law and Civil law; that was after four years at Harvard so I had already studied for eight years, and I wanted to do a Ph.D at that point because I knew then that I wanted to teach law, not to become a practising lawyer although I have done a lot of advising over the years; I wanted to go to a place that was really outstanding for International Law and to have a supervisor that I thought I would really respect; that was Cambridge and Sir Derek Bowett; I was very fortunate; I applied to various scholarships because, again, I couldn't have afforded to come here if I hadn't been on a scholarship; I was granted a Commonwealth Scholarship and I wrote to Sir Derek asking if he'd be prepared to supervise me; he very quickly wrote back and said he would be delighted to do so, assuming I was admitted; so I knew right from the beginning even though the system was not registered for any degree when I first arrived, I then went on and I worked with him on International Arbitration between States and Private Parties; it was a wholly positive experience, he was a superb supervisor, challenging, totally reliable, and it is one of the things I learnt from him, he handed things back almost days after receiving them; I've tried to model myself as a supervisor on him; then when I finished with that I was very fortunate to be chosen as a Law Clerk in the Supreme Court of Canada, working for the Chief Justice of Canada, then at a crucial moment in Canadian legal history; the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms had just been promulgated and so all of the early cases were being decided under the Charter and my boss, the Chief Justice, was really one of the two leading members of the Court in setting a framework for Canadian law which persists to this day; it was an enormous privilege to be working at that time on all of those really fundamental issues; then I was very fortunate to be hired to become a Law professor at McGill University where I had studied, and I was there for fifteen years teaching International Law and some other areas of law

29:34:14 On administration as Vice-Chancellor, in many ways I didn't choose that path; what happened was that at McGill there happened to be a generational gap; there had been a weak hiring for a period so there was a great cohort of senior people, then a less strong cohort of mid-career people, then a cohort of quite engaged and, may I say, talented people at the next generation; so what happened was I was asked to become Dean at McGill when I was thirty-two, so I was very young, I was only an Associate Professor, and I was very unsure about doing that; but I was prevailed upon to take on that role; I did it, and happily it went well and accomplished some quite important things for the University and the Faculty; that set me on a path that I had not really chosen; I'd never imagined that I would want to be University President or Vice-Chancellor, it was not on my radar screen so to speak; I'd always imagined my career as being primarily about international law; but then after I stepped down I was invited to be President of a foundation, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, a wonderful foundation, well endowed, and from that I was head-hunted to be the President of the University of British Columbia and that was a fundamental choice at that moment, both moving to British Columbia, a very different part of Canada, and then deciding that I would indeed be willing to take on a university Presidency; I talked with a lot of people, got lots of advice, and ultimately decided I would do it; but it was by no means a career choice that I made at an early stage

32:03:02 On Cambridge, I will speak of things I would cherish; one is clearly all the work that has been done across the University addressing the issue of access and participation for traditionally excluded groups; so student from black communities, from Pakistani, Bangladeshi communities, white working-class boys – there are a number of communities that just haven't been coming to Cambridge even though there are talented people in those communities; and I have been really inspired by work that has been done across the University to address those gaps; the foundation year, new scholarship opportunities, Cambridge Bursary programme etc.; another thing that I will cherish is simply the fundamental commitment to truly excellent work at a globally sophisticated level; I got to travel – pre-Covid – across the University & seeing people in physics, in anthropology, in sociology, in chemistry, operating at the highest levels of achievement and influence is just remarkable, and I think this is a university that has succeeded generation after generation in encouraging and supporting that level of work, and that's something truly to cherish

33:50:07 Now, most importantly, I will be moving closer to my family; the Covid years quite honestly took a toll in really feeling frustratedly disconnected from children and grandchildren; so I am moving to a city in Toronto where every single member of my family happens now to live just by accident, so that will be wonderful; and I shall be heading up the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research which is a wonderful organisation, a global organisation focussed on building networks to address some of the hardest challenges facing science and humanity, so anti-microbial resistance to economic inequality, and bringing together top people, Nobel Laureates and comparable people, to address those issues across disciplines and across geographies, so I'm really excited about that.

[Reading from 'Second Farewell to Cambridge' by Xu Zhimo, translated by Yao Liang, Choo Liang and Mick Le Moignan]

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