On behalf of the Quest University Community, I would like to take this opportunity to express our deepest condolences to the family of Dr. David Strangway, to his wife Alice, their son, Richard, and daughters Susan and Patricia.
It is a humbling task to honor the passing of an individual who has touched so many lives in the most profound manner. I will do my best to share what David has meant to our community. First and foremost I am reminded of David’s selflessness, which he learned from his parents. During the inaugural event in the President’s Lecture Series last year, David shared the story of his childhood in Angola as the son of Canadian medical missionaries. Even though the majority of his career was spent in Canada, he told the students that Angola was always his home. He spent his entire childhood through high school in Africa and witnessed his parents’ devotion to improving the lives of others in their community. David’s middle name, Cikomo, which means “miracle worker” in the Umbundu dialect, was granted to him by the local community and is certainly a sign of the impact that his family had upon their community.
Secondly, I am reminded of David’s worldliness, which also stems from his youth abroad. He mentioned to our students that many of the children of missionaries and diplomats, whom he met throughout his life, shared an abiding interest in global issues. The scope of David’s vision was the globe.
David had travelled the globe extensively and shared his expertise and vision for building research capacity in North America, Latin America, Asia, and most importantly in his later career, in his home of Angola and other African nations. However, to go back to his inspirational childhood, I believe the international was always connected to the small community in Bié province of central Angola. He grew up there and learned the value of close community ties. David’s vision for Quest University Canada was inspired by the combination of the international and the small community, which in his mind were always linked.
Finally, I would like to remark upon his prescience in seeing that problems of the 21st century would know no boundaries and that the increasing divisions of the 20th century were artificial. His experience leading hundreds of geophysical investigators working on lunar soil samples demonstrated that there were no clear boundaries to scientific inquiry. The divisions between chemistry, geology, and even the various subdivisions of physics, proved meaningless during their investigations. In David’s own words, “What I began to learn is the things that I took for granted from somebody else’s field, […] I would build my ideas upon that person’s work, and they in turn had been building their ideas on my work.”
After many years teaching and leading departments and divisions of the University of Colorado, MIT, University of Toronto, and University of British Columbia, David founded Quest University Canada. The guiding principle was that inquiry should know no boundaries and that Quest students would tackle the challenges of the 21stcentury by asking their own questions – building upon each other’s ideas in a liberal arts & sciences university that was both international and intimate in size.
After engaging with Dr. David Strangway upon my appointment as President, I gained many insights from him about the scope of his original vision for Quest University Canada and the future of higher education in Canada. We had hoped to work closely with him for many years as we initiated the forward planning process for the next decade of this great University’s existence.
His passing is indeed a deep loss to both our community and to the nation. However, David has imparted the University a gift beyond measure. The values that were forged in his childhood and tempered throughout his life and career are built into our campus, our curriculum, our community. We will be forever grateful to him for this gift.
With heartfelt condolences,
Peter Englert, President & Vice-Chancellor
Quest University Canada