Stephen Toope

Stephen Toope OC
Toope at McGill University Law convocation ceremony in 2017
346th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
Incumbent
Assumed office October 1, 2017
Preceded by	Sir Leszek Borysiewicz
2nd Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
In office June 1, 2015 – October 1, 2017
Preceded by	Janice Stein
Succeeded by	Randall Hansen (interim)
12th President of the University of British Columbia
In office July 1, 2006 – June 30, 2014
Preceded by	Martha Piper
Succeeded by	Arvind Gupta
Personal details
Born	Stephen John Toope (1958-02-14) February 14, 1958 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Spouse	Paula Rosen
Children	3
Alma mater	Harvard University (AB) McGill University (LLB, BCL) Trinity College, Cambridge (PhD)
Occupation	Academic administrator
Profession	Academic, lawyer, legal scholar, pedagogue

Stephen John Toope OC (born February 14, 1958) is a Canadian legal scholar, academic administrator and a scholar specializing in human rights, public international law and international relations.

In April 2013 he announced he was stepping down as University of BC president, following an eight-year term. He was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 2015. On 1 October 2017, he became the 346th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Education

Toope graduated from Harvard University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in English Literature and European History. He then received two law degrees – in common law and civil law – from the McGill University Faculty of Law in 1983, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Law Journal. In 1987, he earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in arbitration law at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Career

After completing his PhD, Toope joined McGill University's faculty.

He served as dean of McGill University Faculty of Law from 1994 to 1999. He is the youngest person to have held the position. During his tenure as dean, he led the then-largest capital campaign in Canadian law faculty history to build a new Law library, and oversaw the renewal of the faculty's curriculum.

Toope then headed the Trudeau Foundation, named in honor of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The Foundation is an independent, private, and non-partisan Canadian educational foundation that focuses on identifying outstanding talent in the social sciences and humanities, thereby building a network to promote public debate on issues of societal importance. The Foundation awards five fellowships and 15 doctoral candidate scholarships annually to recognize outstanding achievement in the humanities and social sciences that exemplify innovative public policy approaches and a commitment to public engagement. Established in 2002, the Foundation manages an endowment of more than C$140 million.

In 2006, Toope became the 12th president and vice-chancellor of the University of British Columbia succeeding Martha Piper. He also held an academic position at the university as a tenured professor of law. He assumed the presidential post on July 1, 2006, and held the position for eight years, until June 30, 2014. On April 3, 2013, it was announced that Toope would leave the UBC presidency effective June 2014 to "pursue academic and professional interests in international law and international relations".

In January 2015, Toope became the Director of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

On October 2, 2017, he became the 346th person to serve as Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge University in England, becoming the first non-Briton to do so. He is concurrently Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, a Professorial Fellow of Clare Hall, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

Toope has been consulted extensively by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency. He has won publishing awards from the American Society of International Law and the Canadian Tax Foundation.

He has also conducted various human rights seminars for government officials in Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, and was a member of the UN observer delegation to the first post-apartheid South African elections. He has also served as Research Director, Office of the Special Representative concerning the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People in 1991.

In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from McGill University.

His service to the community includes serving on the boards of non-governmental organizations that promote human rights and international development, including the Canadian Human Rights Foundation, the World University Service of Canada and the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

In an op-edit, in 2018 he criticized British politicians for "condemning UK universities as broken and in need of market discipline."

In 2019, he received an honorary LLD from the Law Society of Ontario. During his annual university address, in 2020 he announced Cambridge was removing fossil fuel investments from its portfolio.

Controversy

Toope was mentioned in a controversy about Jesus College's China/UK Global Issues Dialogue Centre.

The Dialogue Centre published in February 2020 a report about telecommunications reforms. It praised Huawei, advancing ideas thought to be beneficial to Chinese interests. The report carried a foreword from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

On July 9, 2020, after Freedom of Information requests, Jesus College admitted it had accepted £200,000 for the Dialogue Centre from a branch of the Chinese State Council, £55,000 from another branch for the China Centre and £150,000 from Huawei for the digital report. Until then, not even the Fellows of Jesus College – the governing body – had been informed.

Personal

Toope took up residence in Cambridge in 2018, along with his wife, Paula Rosen, a speech-language pathologist and musical theatre composer. They have three adult children.