Q&A: David Strangway, lunar explorer and university founder

After his first year at the University of Toronto, David Strangway got a summer job surveying for the highway department in northern Ontario. By the time he returned to school for his sophomore year, he knew he didn’t want to spend his life in the lab. He entered a special program in physics and geology that allowed him to study “out in the environment and out of doors a great deal.”

Strangway started his career at a mining company, applying geophysical techniques to search for copper-gold deposits, iron ore, and lead-zinc deposits in northern Ontario and Greenland. He then returned to Toronto, where he earned his physics PhD in 1960 for work on the magnetism and electromagnetism of rocks.

Over the course of his career, Strangway undertook stints in industry, academia, science leadership, and policy. He served as president of the universities of Toronto and British Columbia. He helped start the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), an independent funding body, and the Canada Research Chairs program, which has created more than 2000 new faculty positions across Canada. He also founded Quest University, Canada’s first private liberal arts and sciences college, which launched 10 years ago in Squamish, British Columbia, 65 kilometers north of Vancouver.

Strangway grew up in Angola, where his parents were medical missionaries for 40 years. “I went to school in what was then Southern Rhodesia; today they call it Zimbabwe. It would take a week to get to school on the train,” he said. Although he spent his adulthood in North America, he never lost his ties to the land of his childhood. “There was something formative for me about growing up in Angola,” he said.

When Strangway spoke with Physics Today in October 2016, he was writing a book about his parents and the time they spent in Angola. He was also working with policymakers there and in other countries in Africa to promote education and to stem the emigration of educated professionals. He died unexpectedly on 13 December at age 82.

PT: What did you do after finishing your PhD?

STRANGWAY: I worked for a mining company in Denver for a year, using magnetic and electromagnetic techniques for exploration and developing new techniques for exploration.

I was then offered a position at the University of Colorado. I was on the faculty for a number of years, and then MIT came calling. It’s very hard to turn down MIT.

One of the things that happened was that the space agency [NASA] realized they were heading for the Moon, so they went around to various institutions and said, “Have you got any ideas of what we should do?” I responded with two proposals.

Around the same time, the mid 1960s, I had a job offer from the University of Toronto. Deciding whether to leave MIT was a harder decision than going there. But [my wife and I] decided that if we didn’t go back to Canada then, we never would. Within a year I was asked if I would head up the physics and geophysics division of NASA’s space center in Houston. We packed up and moved again. I was involved for the next three years in the Apollo program.

PT: What were some of the highlights at NASA?

STRANGWAY: We designed the experiment that we eventually sent on Apollo 17. It was an electromagnetic sounding experiment. I was looking at the magnetic and electrical properties of the lunar return samples.

I became a member of a very interesting group of people. It was a place where you began to cross all kinds of discipline boundaries, and you began to realize that if you are studying fundamental problems, they don’t belong to a discipline; they bring different disciplines together to tackle interesting problems.

PT: Did your sounding experiment on the Moon yield anything interesting?

STRANGWAY: It did. Because there is absolutely no moisture or water, from an electromagnetic point of view the Moon is quite transparent. Our experiment sounded as deep as a kilometer into the surface and told us a lot about the outer crust of the lunar surface, with all the smashing up and meteorite impacts over the millennia.

I started off working in mining companies with magnetics and electromagnetics, and I ended up working on the Moon with magnetics and electromagnetics.

PT: Did the University of Toronto hold your position for you?

STRANGWAY: Yes, I was on leave. When I went back, I became head of the geology department and was eventually invited to be the vice president of academics, which I did for a number of years. Then they invited a new man to be president, but he died of a heart attack a month before he was to take office, so I was appointed president for a year.

PT: Not much later, in 1985, you took the helm of the University of British Columbia, which you led for a dozen years. Describe your time there.

STRANGWAY: UBC was a good university, but it did not have a big international reputation. I worked very hard to build and connect it to the broader world. One thing that was distinctive in the Canadian context was that every time you looked around, there were always connections to the Asian Pacific—to China, Japan, Taiwan. So we tried to position UBC as the national university on the west coast. We built strength in Korean studies, Chinese studies, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

PT: It seems like physics at UBC rose in stature during your tenure too.

STRANGWAY: It happened in many disciplines, certainly in physics and astronomy. By building up the reputation, it also meant you were able to attract some of the best people in the world, the best students and the best faculty members.

PT: Were there any surprises about running a large university?

STRANGWAY: You had a lot of opportunities to interact with alumni. And you spent a lot of time “friend-raising,” which is a euphemism for fund-raising in the long run. I spent a lot of time with local governments, inviting people over for daylong workshops so they could see what the university was contributing to the broader community. Doing administration for me was not easy, but it meant that you dealt with issues as they arose. And unlike when I was doing science, when I went home for the weekend, my desk was clear.

PT: What came next for you?

STRANGWAY: Well, just at the time I stepped down as president, I got a call from our prime minister [Jean Chrétien]. It must have been midnight his time, and we spent a good hour on the phone. He basically described the treaties we had on Pacific salmon. If the salmon come from BC waters, they are BC salmon. If they come from Washington State waters, they are American salmon, and if they come from Alaskan waters, they are Alaskan salmon. The problem is, when the salmon go out into the ocean they have no flags on their backs.

The prime minister wanted me to work with the US on a new salmon treaty. [US envoy] William Ruckelshaus and I spent many months talking to people in Alaska, BC, and Washington State. The conclusion we came to was very simple: The fishermen wanted to catch their share, or more, before the next guys caught theirs. In the end it led not to a new treaty, but to a new working arrangement as to how these fish were going to be divided.

PT: You then became the founding president of CFI, an independent funding agency.

STRANGWAY: Before I stepped down from UBC, there was a key meeting with [Canada’s] finance minister, Paul Martin. He had not only slain the deficit, but actually had a surplus. What he was afraid about, I think, was that everyone would line up and try to get their piece of the pie.

He met with about a dozen university presidents and asked us, “If we create this program, would you guys be able to raise matching funds?” For every 40 cents the government put in, the universities would have to come up with 60 cents. The university presidents sitting around the table all said yes. So the government went ahead and created CFI as an independent foundation. They put in $800 million. We had general guidelines but no political intervention. It was really quite remarkable. Basically, the criterion was “Is this going to lead to something transformative?”

The CFI has lasted through several governments. And well over $5 billion [from the government] has gone into it. With the matching funds, it’s been a $12 billion boost in the R&D capacity focused on equipment and facilities. In many cases the institutions leveraged their CFI money to do additional stuff, so I suspect the total impact is more than that.

PT: What are some examples of CFI projects?

STRANGWAY: The CFI funded the Neptune project, an underwater observatory off the west coast with sensors on the ocean floor. There are seismic and other detectors. We retrofit a coast guard icebreaker to make it into a scientific vessel that does research in the Arctic. The Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon was a CFI-supported project. And we did a lot of smaller projects.

PT: Why did you found Quest University?

STRANGWAY: When I was on the faculty at MIT, one of the things I realized was that many of our best graduate students came from liberal arts colleges. It’s a model that is almost uniquely American. And my view, having lived in the US for about 10 years, was that those colleges had an enormous impact on the intellectual life of the country.

My idea was, wouldn’t it be nice to have a small institution that was focused on the kind of students who are interested in learning but don’t really know what they want to do. We wanted about half the students to come from outside the country. So, in a funny way it goes back to my roots and to various pieces of my career. There are now about 800 students from about 30 countries.

PT: Talking about your roots, you’ve also been trying to emulate Canada Research Chairs in Africa.

STRANGWAY: I have been trying hard to do that, but I haven’t been successful yet. In Canada, the research chairs have had a big impact. The issue for Africa is not only sending PhD candidates away, but getting them back into positions where they can do good things. I’ve been working on this with Tanzania and Nigeria.

PT: What’s needed to get it to work?

STRANGWAY: A check. I am looking for $10 million, $15 million. Something in that range would have an enormous impact on the three institutions I’m talking to, because you could attract and keep the best people.

PT: What do you see as the biggest needs for science?

STRANGWAY: One thing that comes up often is the Square Kilometre Array. That is an amazing infrastructure, and it’s being built in Africa. What worries me about some of these places, as they try to move into the world of science, is that they need to consider how they are going to have the people to actually run the machines. It’s one thing to get a beautiful piece of modern machinery, and another to get an outstanding faculty member. It seems to me that one thing to focus on is to make sure they have the right technical support, the people who make the machinery hum.