A Generation of Excellence: A History of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (review)

In 1980 John Leyerle, a medievalist, dean of the Graduate School at the University of Toronto and a man known for his fertile imagination and enthusiasm, had a grand idea: to create at the University of Toronto an institute for advanced scholarship not unlike Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein found refuge when he fled Germany. But also not quite like it. Leyerle’s institute would be a place wherein the most fundamental scholarship would be nurtured and celebrated for its own sake, an institute able to ‘snatch high quality from the jaws of mediocrity’ which ‘government regulations imposed on the Universities’ and where the criterion for success stated at an early meeting with the terse clarity of a mathematical proof was the augmentation by ‘one or more the number of world-class people at the University of Toronto.’

After several weeks of reflection, U of T’s new president, James Ham, opted not to host the institute. If Leyerle’s idea was to take root it would have to do so outside the university and be championed by someone who could advance the promise and secure the great gobs of new funding such an ambitious enterprise required. Fraser Mustard was such a person, whose great energy and considerable ambition and charisma could move such an idea along both as a labour of love and as a vehicle for securing personal goals. Chance brought those notions and those people together at that auspicious moment and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research was born. Mustard set about to create what must be one of the most influential boards anywhere for a research enterprise and a fledgling one at that, whose ability to fly was by no means assured. The board, drawn from Canada’s most eminent business people with a sprinkling of key political figures, gave the cifar and Fraser Mustard simultaneously a level of pizzazz and credibility that most eminent organizations require several generations to acquire.

Mustard scuttled Leyele’s original concept, replacing it instead by structures and programs largely invented and chosen by him with input from members of the board and a somewhat more technical research council. With their help he went about raising funds, finding that even with such a powerful group at his side obtaining the continuous flow of resources required was a gruelling task.

The programs established had interdisciplinarity as their hallmark, an attribute, highly valued nowadays, but rather bold and risky in 1980. The topics chosen for study ranged from artificial intelligence and robotics to population health, and from economic growth and policy to the science of soft surfaces and interfaces.

Craig Brown is an able, effective, and engaging writer and storyteller. He constructs the story as a gripping one of repeated near-death experiences avoided, often at the last minute, by the infusion of new resources, not least through loans from the universities whose participation was secured in the first place by the promise of new funding into their programs by the cifar. As an insider and founder of the cifar, Brown projects the optical vibrancy and the blindness of the eyewitness observer. For example, Brown summarizes the state of events in the fall of 1992 in the following partisan manner: ‘Given its meager resources at its beginnings, the institute’s accomplishments were already far greater than could have been dreamed a decade earlier.’

Embedded in this history are a number of other potentially interesting stories that, if told fully, would comment on leadership and management of academic institutions. The story of U of T President James Ham, a man so ‘cautious’ that the sole vision he could formulate for the university a few days after taking the helm was that financial exigencies might force him to dismiss tenured faculty. Brown chooses words carefully when describing the relief Ham feels when, after months of planning, the nascent Board of the cifar concluded that the institute should not...