This year, four years into his 10-year term as president of the University of Cincinnati, Santa J. Ono was winning praise for gains in enrollment and fund raising and for his leadership in response to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a campus police officer in 2015.
Then an unexpected opportunity arose to go home to Vancouver, Canada — at a significant pay cut — to lead the University of British Columbia. Mr. Ono took the helm of the global top-20 public institution, with more than 60,000 students, in mid-August.
“It was incredibly hard for me to decide, ‘Do I stay at an institution I love and where things were going well, or do I move to my dream job?’” he says. “It had nothing to do with money.” Instead, “it was all about joining an institution that was transformative in my family’s life.”
A Canadian citizen as well as a naturalized American citizen, Mr. Ono was born in Vancouver, where his Japanese-born father taught mathematics at UBC for a short time before returning to the United States, where he had already begun his academic career.
Beyond family ties, Mr. Ono says, the quality and trajectory of the institution were part of the attraction.
His arrival at the university bears similarities to his rise at Cincinnati. In 2012 he was senior vice president for academic affairs and provost when he was appointed to replace President Gregory H. Williams, who left unexpectedly early in his term. UBC’s president, Arvind Gupta, resigned after one year in office over conflicts with the university’s governing body. The university’s Faculty Association declared no confidence in the board in March, citing a lack of openness.
Mr. Ono believes his experience in Cincinnati, where he drew more than 75,000 Twitter followers and donated part of his income for scholarships, will help him at UBC. Already, he has more than 6,000 followers to @ubcprez.
Strengthening the model of shared governance at the university “will take a little more work,” he says, though he feels encouraged by what he has heard so far from all parties.
“Faculty lie at the heart of the institution,” he says, and the job of university administrators and the governing board is to “make it possible for the faculty to shine and the students to be transformed and reach their dreams.”
In an email, Mark Mac Lean, president of the UBC Faculty Association and a professor of teaching in the mathematics department, praised Mr. Ono’s “wealth of experience and leadership skill” and added, “We are optimistic that he will lead our community in a positive new direction.”
As head of a top Canadian university, Mr. Ono faces a challenge not encountered in Cincinnati: how to attract and retain academic talent despite a low Canadian dollar and sky-high Vancouver housing prices.
At UBC, Mr. Ono will earn 470,000 Canadian dollars, or about $360,930, compared with his base pay of $525,000 in Cincinnati (excluding more than $100,000 annually in deferred compensation, bonuses, and an undisclosed sum to stay).
“It is a fraction of what I could earn,” he says. “I hope it makes it clear that money doesn’t drive me.”
Last May, with the presidential search in its final stage, Mr. Ono spoke at an event in the Cincinnati area to raise funds for a mental-health-awareness program. There he disclosed for the first time publicly that he had attempted suicide in his teens and late 20s. His candor about his past experience with depression drew wide praise. The reaction from UBC was “amazing,” he says. “I went back and had the finalist interview, and I had unanimous support and respect” for speaking up.
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