Stephen Toope has been officially installed as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, saying in a ceremony at Senate House this morning that he was “thrilled” to serve the University.

Toope is the 346th person to hold the title, and will be taking the place of Leszek Borysiewicz in Cambridge’s most senior executive role.

He called for Cambridge take a “global lead” in nurturing collaboration and research.

Toope has previously been director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and between 2006 and 2014 he served as president and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia (UBC).

A graduate of Trinity College, Toope studied History and Literature at Harvard University before earning degrees in common law and civil law at McGill University, in his native Canada.

In his inaugural address, he paid tribute to Borysiewicz and his other predecessors, and acknowledged the turbulence of the present situation in both higher education and wider British politics, saying: “My appointment coincided with the beginning of a period of profound unease.”

“I have described it before as a new age of anxiety,” he said, “marked by a widespread distrust in institutions, in experts, and in business-as-usual politics.

Against this backdrop, he said, “Cambridge must take a global lead as the place where barriers between areas of knowledge are broken down, the place where global collaborations are seeded and nurtured.”

Addressing the Congregation, which included academics, administrative staff and students, he recalled with fondness his time in the city as a PhD candidate.

“This audience does not need me to tell it what makes the University of Cambridge the thriving institution it is today,” he said.

He said that Cambridge members “are bound by our shared purposes and our willingness to share resources and talents”, and praised the University’s “uncompromising commitment to excellence in education”.

Speaking on the topic of higher education reform, currently surrounded by controversy as the government pushes through legislation reforming the sector, he expressed his conviction in the University’s ability to sustain its global position – evidenced by Cambridge’s second-place ranking in the Times Higher Education global league tables earlier this year.

“Over the past five years alone UK universities have seen an unparalleled shakeup in the way they are funded, governed and evaluated,” he said. “[But] universities, including this great university, are used to being battered by external forces of change. Cambridge has survived, and then thrived, through the Reformation, civil war, world wars, depressions and recessions, economic bubbles, and more.”

“No single country or discipline can have exclusive purchase on how we attack today’s fundamental problems – nor can a single institution, no matter how high in the league tables,” he said. “With its breadth and depth of expertise, with its history of truly disruptive discovery, Cambridge must take a global lead as the place where barriers between areas of knowledge are broken down, the place where global collaborations are seeded and nurtured.”

While at UBC, Toope focused on undergraduate experience, saying “if you come to school and it’s just going to a bunch of classes and you’re just getting through so that you can do something after, I would see that as a failure”. He was popular among many students, earning the affectionate title ‘Toope Lion’