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32 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2016 T hands, and one of his biggest problems may be the unhealthy glow of his developing rock star status. "Where some university presidents have not succeeded is by raising expectations to unre- alistic levels," says Mitchell. "A university president is part fig- urehead, part diplomat, but cannot be the fixer extraordinaire." Ono has promised to lead the university on a visioning pro- cess to develop a new strategic plan. He says the board expects him to take UBC to a new place, and he is planning to do that. Ono's decisions about his support team and his leadership will set a possibly transformative new course for UBC for years afterward. That's the best-case scenario. The less appealing one is that he fails to get the UBC freighter to deviate much from its course, that he is unsuccessful at convincing the inde- pendent dukedoms to do anything different—or even that he crashes and burns, as so many new university presidents are doing these days. The ghost of a stammer flickers when Santa Ono speaks. Just a repetition, very occasionally, of a syllable in his otherwise fluid and scholarly style: com-complex; psych-psychiatric. It's a legacy of his first years at school, where he struggled to adapt as one of the only Asian children in his American elementary school and one whose parents spoke Japanese at home. "I had to work with a speech pathologist to learn how to make North American sounds with my mouth," Ono explains in a lengthy interview earlier this summer. "Hav- ing difficulty speaking in English, I stuttered as a youth." There are other faint reminders of a childhood that wasn't easy. As the interview begins, in a standard-issue seventh-f loor boardroom (his office is being reorga- nized), Ono sits at first with his hands pressed together between his legs. Ono is the middle child of a brilliant Japanese mathematician, Takashi, and his wife, Sachiko, who ran the household like a general. The pair were "tiger parents," in the words of Ono's younger brother, Ken, now a renowned mathematician himself. Ken's biography, My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count, published in April 2016, is laced with references to the parents' demands that their children excel—and the impact it had on them. "If I wasn't the best student, then I would bring shame on my family. It was understood that it was my duty to be 'the best,'" wrote Ken. That pressure produced a state of constant anxiety, filling his head with reprimanding voices that reminded him at every moment that he was failing. The oldest son, Momoro—born in Japan before his parents arrived in the U.S.—was designated the one to excel in music. While all the boys had lessons at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory, Momoro went on to become a performing pianist, according to plan, and is now a music professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Ken, six years Santa's junior, showed an early talent for math and knew he was expected to become an academic. "Santa, the middle son, had a different path," wrote Ken. "He was often described as the black sheep of the family, which is ironic, because he is the one who will go on to be the most successful son. My parents felt that he was unlikely to amount to much of anything, so he was expected to be an ordinary company man, whatever that means." Takashi Ono had come to the United States in 1959 after another prominent mathematician, André Weil, invited him to do research at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. The couple arrived never intending to stay more than a few years, but they did—for three years in New Jersey, before a one-year stint in Vancouver for the 1962-63 academic year, after Takashi's American green card had expired. Santa was born at St. Paul's Hospital on November 23, 1962, the year they were in B.C., which has left him with dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship. The family moved back to the States when Takashi got a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1969, the family landed in Baltimore, where Takashi would be a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins University until his retirement in 2011. The suburbs of Baltimore in the 1960s and '70s were not places where Japanese people got a warm welcome. Sachiko would get called a Jap and a Nip when she went grocery shop- ping. They were refused service at gas stations. One time, a local teenager shot out the windows of their house in the suburban community of Towson, then described as a sleepy burg with a small-town feel. At school, in second grade, Ken was dragged to a forested area and tied to a tree, while a gang of kids shoved the rotting carcass of a bird down his back. The parents never fought back and never complained, not wanting to attract attention. Instead, they contin- ued to push their boys to excel—and they exerted strong controls. Santa, even though his parents' expectations of him were low, wasn't allowed to go to his high-school prom; when he went anyway, his parents hunted him down and made him come home with them. Those experiences left their mark on the emotional states of both Ken and Santa. In his book, Ken describes an incident in his 20s where he tried to drive into the path of an oncom- ing truck on a highway because he was so despondent about having performed badly at an academic conference. At the last minute, he swerved away. Santa, in a startling admission in a May speech to a couple of hundred people at a mental-health fundraiser, said he had attempted suicide twice—once when he was 14 (taking a combination of cold medications and beer), and ONO IS THE MIDDLE CHILD OF A BRILLIANT JAPANESE MATHEMATICIAN, TAK ASHI, AND HIS WIFE,