B18 OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | FRIDAY,SEPTEMBER13,2019
J
ohn McArthur was headed for life in the forests of
British Columbia when the woman in his life hint-
ed she wasn’t up for living “in the north woods.”
Instead, Dr. McArthur, who died on Aug. 20 at the
age of 85, became the dean of the Harvard Busi-
ness School. It wasn’t a straight line.
John Hector McArthur was born in Vancouver in
March 31, 1934, and grew up in suburban Burnaby, B.C.
His father, Hector, was a government grain inspector,
his mother, Elizabeth, a stay-at-home mother.
John went to Burnaby South high school, where he
was a football star. And he was tough, according to
one of his classmates, Ritchie Eustis, who later be-
came a Hollywood screenwriter.
“He was the terror of the 12th grade,” Mr. Eustis told
the newspaper USA Today. “He was a real tough, vola-
tile guy, a good linebacker, and he was said to have
been the smartest kid ever to graduate from our high
school.”
From the mid-eighties to early nineties, Mr. Eustis
wrote and produced a sitcom for ABC calledHead of
the Class,set in a Manhattan classroom. John was the
inspiration for the character Eric Mardian, a rebel ge-
nius in a leather jacket, played by Brian Robbins.
During the summers and after school, John
worked in a local sawmill owned by the
Koerner family, Jewish immigrants
from Czechoslovakia. He was just
sweeping floors, but they spotted his
promise and offered to back him if he
went to university.
He took them up on it and studied
forestry at the University of British
Columbia. He also played football on a
semi-pro team, the Vancouver Blue
Bombers, and had offers to play profes-
sional football. There was no future in
that, and no money in it back then. His girlfriend from
high school, Natty Ewasiuk, was the one who talked
him into dropping out of forestry and switching to
commerce.
“I was a little concerned because I could see that
most people who took forestry ended up in the north
woods,” Dr. McArthur said in a 1985 interview. “My
friend [his future wife, Natty] wasn’t interested in go-
ing into the north woods.”
Dr. McArthur was married by the time he gradu-
ated from UBC in 1957. He applied to three top busi-
ness schools in the United States: Harvard, Stanford
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
and his wife rejected Stanford because California was
too much like B.C. and they picked Harvard because it
had a prettier campus than MIT.
The tough kid from Burnaby experienced major
culture shock when he arrived at the hallowed Ivy
League institution.
“He arrived in class the first day wearing a bright
pink shirt, only to discover the dress code was sports
coat and tie,” wrote Jeffrey Cruikshank in a 2008 pro-
file. “The first time he dared to speak in class, he used
the Canadian pronunciation of the word ‘schedule’
and was none too gently mocked by his professor and
classmates.”
Another classmate with a foreign accent was James
Wolfensohn, an Australian, with whom Dr. McArthur
became close friends. Mr. Wolfensohn went on to be-
come president of the World Bank and enlisted Dr.
McArthur as a trusted adviser.
Dr. McArthur completed his MBA in 1959, then
earned his doctorate; he started teaching at the uni-
versity in 1962.
Harvard Business School is one of the top schools
of its kind in the world. It invented the “Case Study”
system, in which students are presented with a real-
world business problem and then set out to solve it.
Dr. McArthur was named dean of the Harvard Busi-ness School on New Year’s Day, 1980, and held the
post for 15 years. Although he worked in one of the
most elite American institutions, he never stopped
being a proud Canadian.
“It was an extraordinary thing: You could go down
to Harvard, and you could have a group of academics
around the table and, in every conversation, he
would get in his Canadian roots and the fact that he
was a Canadian and the values that he was so proud
of,” says Kevin Lynch, former Clerk of the Privy Coun-
cil, and now vice-chairman of BMO Financial Group.
Although he lived in Boston, Dr. McArthur trav-
elled back to Canada several times a year to see family
members and work on various corporate and not-for-
profit boards, including the Asia Pacific Foundation,
where he served as chair.
Jack Austin, a retired senator and former Liberal
cabinet minister, said Dr. McArthur went out of his
way to recruit Canadians for the Ivy League school.
“John went out to various universities in Canada
looking for top students to come to the Harvard Busi-
ness School,” Mr. Austin said.
During his tenure, Dr. McArthur was credited with
creating a more diverse student body at the business
school – more women, more international students.
“He was a great recruiter and talent scout,” says
Carol Lee, a successful businesswoman from Van-
couver who graduated from the Harvard Business
School. “I met John at an event at UBC,
where he was getting an award, and he
encouraged me to apply to HBS. I know
he did this with others as well. Once I
arrived on campus, he always looked
out for me. He really supported the stu-
dents from Canada and later set up the
Canadian Initiative for HBS.”
There is a John H. McArthur Cana-
dian Fellowship that provides financial
assistance to Canadians to allow them
to attend Harvard Business School. A
prestigious professorship and student residence also
bear his name.
His style as dean and on the boards he sat on was
that of the teacher: question rather than dictate.
“He always asked two things: ‘What is the purpose
of what we are doing’ and the second question was,
‘Are we making an impact?’ Those are two pretty
good questions to ask, and I always thought that John
led as much by his questions; it was never by direc-
tive, it was by questions that forced you to confront
the reality, good or bad,” Mr. Lynch said.
John McArthur’s position at the Harvard Business
School meant that he was a superstar in corporate
America and supremely well-connected. He had a
string of corporate directorships: He sat on the
boards of Bell Canada, Telesat Canada, Chase Manhat-
tan Corp., Teradyne Inc. and others. He also was a
founding board member of the Canada Development
Investment Corp., set up in the Pierre Trudeau era.
Although Dr. McArthur was a free-market capitalist,
he understoodgovernment involvement in industry.
His doctoral thesis at Harvard was howthe govern-
ment of France directed and invested in that coun-
try’s economy.
After he retired from Harvard in 1995, he stayed on
many boards and started working with his Australian
friend from his early days at Harvard. By this time,
James Wolfensohn was president of the World Bank,
one of the most important financial institutions in
the world, the backbone of the world order following
the Second World War.
Dr. McArthur had honorary doctorates from seven
universities in Canada, the United States and Spain,
and was an officer of the Order of Canada.
He leaves his wife, Natty; daughters, Susan Radov-
sky and Jocelyn Swisher; and four grandchildren; as
well as his brother, Kenneth.Special to The Globe and MailHARVARDDEANWAS
PROUDTOBECANADIAN
HeovercamehisinitialcultureshockattheeliteIvyLeagueinstitution
andthrivedthere,becomingawiseleaderandsupportivementortomanyDuring his tenure,
Dr. McArthur
was credited with
creating a more
diverse student body
at the business
school.JohnMcArthurdeliversopeningremarksataneventforthe2019JohnH.McArthur
DistinguishedFellowshipattheUniversityofTorontoinJanuary.COURTESY OF APF CANADAJOHNMcARTHUR
ACADEMICADMINISTRATOR,85FREDLANGANOBITUARIES
To submit an I Remember:[email protected]
Send us a memory of someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page.
Please include I Remember in the subject fieldD
aniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter
and visual artist whose childlike,
haunted songs brought him ac-
claim as one of America’s most gift-
ed outsider voices, was found dead Wednes-
day morning at his home in Waller, Tex.,
outside Houston. He was 58.
His brother and manager, Dick, said that
Mr. Johnston had probably died overnight.
He did not specify the cause.
Mr. Johnston had been released from a
hospital Tuesday after being treated for kid-
ney issues. “He was still productive, writing
songs and drawing, and was just annoyed by
his health more than anything,” his brother
said. “It was just one thing after another.”
In a career that was filled with stops and
starts, Mr. Johnston became something of a
man-child celebrity of the artistic under-
ground, earning the admiration of rock stars
such as Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits as well
as comparisons to William Blake.
His cartoon drawings – rendered in Magic
Marker and frequently inspired by charac-
ters such as Casper the Friendly Ghost –
were included in the Whitney Biennial exhi-
bition in 2006 at the Whitney Museum of
American Art.
Yet, Mr. Johnston was dogged by mental-
health problems that stunted his career and
periodically hospitalized him. In recent
years, he had largely been confined to his
family’s home; in 2017, he went on a farewell
tour backed by members of the bands Fuga-
zi, Wilco and Built to Spill.
As news of his death spread, Mr. Johnston
was mourned online by creators across me-
diums and generations, among them Beck,
director Judd Apatow and John Darnielle of
the literary-minded indie band the Moun-
tain Goats. Producer Jack Antonoff praised
the way Mr. Johnston “shared fearlessly.”
Mr. Johnston was born on Jan. 22, 1961, in
Sacramento, Calif., the youngest of five chil-
dren in what he described as a Christian fun-
damentalist household.
At a young age, he moved with his family
to West Virginia, but by the early 1980s he
had relocated to the underground rock cen-
tre of Austin, Tex., where he handed out
homemade cassettes to friends and custom-
ers while working at a McDonald’s.
According to Mr. Johnston’s website,
those tapes were recorded on a $59 Sanyo
boombox.
He quickly
gained the
notice of fellow
musicians and
the music
press with
songs, such as
Speeding Motor-
cycleandDon’t
Play Cards With
Satan, that had
a poignant
clarity yet
showed
glimpses of a
fractured
mind. He be-
came almost as
well known for the strange, cartoonish art
that decorated the tapes. One,Hi, How Are
You, featured a froglike alien, and the image
became his signature.
With a boyish voice and a gift for pure
melody – his biggest inspiration was the
Beatles – Mr. Johnston sang candidly and
sometimes disturbingly about his demons.
“Despair came knocking at my door, and I
let her in for a while,” he sang onDespair
Came Knocking, fromHi, How Are You. “She
sat on the couch and began smoking. She
said nothing.”
Climbing the rungs of the indie-rock
world, Mr. Johnston was featured on MTV in
1985, and three years later came to New
York, where he mixed with the bands Sonic
Youth and Galaxie 500 – but ended up in
Bellevue Hospital after he assaulted Sonic
Youth’s drummer, Steve Shelley. (Upon his
release, Mr. Johnston went straight to CBGB
to perform.)
At the same time, Mr. Johnston’s songs
were becoming indie-rock standards.Speed-
ing Motorcycle, capturing the thrill and fear
of passion – “Speeding motorcycle, don’t
you drive recklessly/Speeding motorcycle of
my heart” – was covered by Yo La Tengo, the
Pastels, Mary Lou Lord and others.
In 1991, Mr. Johnston made a joint album
with Jad Fair of the band Half Japanese, who
had cultivated a similar reputation as an ec-
centric. But by comparison, the rock guide
Trouser Press said, Mr. Fair “seems about as
offbeat as an insurance salesman,” as Mr.
Johnston muttered “Poor you, no one un-
derstands you” in a warped, ghostlike voice.
In the music industry’s alternative-rock
gold rush of the 1990s, Mr. Johnston was
briefly signed to Atlantic Records. But his
sole major-label album,Fun, released in
1994, was a flop, and the label soon dropped
him.
As Mr. Johnston’s mental-health prob-
lems mounted – he said he suffered from
manic depression – he largely withdrew
from performing and remained at his family
home.
In addition to his brother, he leaves three
sisters, Margy Johnston, Sally Reid and Cin-
dy Brewer.NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICEBENSISARIODANIELJOHNSTON
SINGER-SONGWRITER,58DanielJohnstonUndergroundrocker,
cartoonistfound
fansinCobain,Waits