Talking leadership: David Farrar on Canada ‘undermining universities’ funding’

David Farrar is on a mission to have the world embrace nuclear power. The president of McMaster University in Toronto – a region where more than half of all electricity comes from nuclear sources – believes climate change would look very different today if nuclear power had been widely accepted back in the 1950s.

Farrar says nuclear power gets a bad rap. “The whole area of nuclear power generation grew up at the same time we were dealing with nuclear weapons out of the Second World War; it was a very complex time,” he says. “If you’re going to use nuclear power, it needs to be highly regulated, and you need to build it and use it in a safe way. And because it was simpler to burn fossil fuels, which didn’t seem dangerous back in the ’50s, people did it, and they didn’t do the hard work of the regulation and the construction of nuclear sources.” If they had, he believes, “we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.”

McMaster was the first university in the Commonwealth to have a nuclear reactor for research, and its history is linked to the atomic bomb. An early president, Harry Thode, was a chemist who studied isotopes. Robert Oppenheimer asked Thode to join the Manhattan Project to produce the first nuclear weapons. As Thode did not want to move to Los Alamos, New Mexico, he contributed from Hamilton, Canada. “They opened a little piece of the Manhattan Project in Hamilton,” Farrar says.

In 1959, the McMaster Nuclear Reactor became operational. Thanks to the reactor, the university is today a world leader in medical radioactive isotopes, used for the next generation of radiotherapy (“it kills the tumour, but it doesn’t kill anything else in the area”).

The university is working towards using a small modular reactor to supply energy to the campus, supplemented by renewable power sources, to become a completely carbon-neutral campus. “This region has very low carbon in its electricity, because so much of our power…in Ontario is nuclear. But we would like to be a demonstration project for what smaller reactors can do, for small northern communities, for island states, for a whole series of areas,” says Farrar.

Next year, Farrar, who, like Thode, is a chemist by background, will step down. His tenure has not always been plain sailing. A few weeks after he took the helm in December 2019, the world locked down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a serious case of sexual misconduct by an academic came to light.

Scott Watter, who taught in the psychology, neuroscience and behaviour department, was acquitted of sexual assault charges in 2022 and removed from the faculty at McMaster in May 2024. He had had sexual relations with several students, including one who was having mental health struggles and self-harming. The report from the university committee that investigated the case notes: “In the Committee’s view, Dr. Watter encouraged Student 1 to engage in cutting – repeatedly engaging in flirting and sexual innuendo in his text messages, advising her about wound care and methods to reduce scarring.”

The university has been criticised for the time it took to remove Watter. “In the last few months, we have completed what was a long process and terminated him,” Farrar says. “It’s a very long and complex process at universities, and you need to take the time and work through them carefully and do them right. And I think we did.”

What did Farrar learn from the process? “This is not a unique case to McMaster. There have been these cases that have gone on in universities. They’re not common, but you can find them in universities around the world. And first of all you need to follow procedures. It was more difficult because we were in the virtual environment when we started the procedures, and so it was a little bit more complicated…But the policies and procedures are pretty common to universities and are very rigorous, and you need to follow your policies.” Watter was suspended while the investigation proceeded.

Whether universities should ban all relationships between staff and students has been a topic of debate at some institutions. At McMaster, the policy is that the staff member should not have power over the student. “People do fall in love. And if that happens and that is a student, then there’s a power imbalance. And you need to get rid of that power imbalance. If this is one of your graduate students, for example, that graduate student should move somewhere else,” Farrar says. “People are going to enter into relationships, and it’s dealing with that power imbalance that’s the important part of it.”

During his leadership, McMaster has also been stuck in a pincer movement when it comes to student recruitment and funding: the provincial government froze the number of undergraduate students it would fund, and then the federal government limited the number of visas for international students. The latter move has damaged Canada’s reputation, Farrar says. “The fact that you’re asking about it from the UK means that the world is looking at us and saying, ‘Well, you know, if I can’t get a visa [for Canada], should I look to Europe or Australia or someplace else to go to?’” he says. “Between the provincial government and the federal government, they have undermined our funding structures.”

The visa freeze is for undergraduates only, and McMaster has already seen a drop in applications of about 10 per cent to 15 per cent, he estimates. Moreover, postgraduate applications are down, too.

He does concede that some smaller colleges have been admitting too many international students, for the higher tuition fees they bring in, and providing a substandard education. “Our undergraduate international students are about 15 per cent of our student body. So it’s a small number for us, but we’re caught in a bigger situation.”

Farrar won’t be caught in the situation for long, however, as he is retiring in June 2025. “I’m at an age where I should step down. I think I’ve gotten the university through a number of difficult issues, and it’s time for new leadership.”

rosa.ellis@timeshighereducation.com

This is part of our “Talking leadership” series with the people running the world’s top universities about how they solve common strategic issues and implement change. Follow the series here.