McGill University

McGill University

Motto	Grandescunt aucta labore<br\>(By work, all things increase and grow)
Established	1821
Type	Public university
Location	Montreal, QC Canada
Website	www.mcgill.ca

McGill University is a public university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821, McGill is one of the oldest universities in Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant (born in Scotland), whose bequest formed the beginning of the university. McGill has 13 faculties and professional schools, offering degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, including medicine. Its language of instruction is English. Research is well regarded, as the university has been recognized for its award-winning research and participates in research organizations both within Canada and in the world.

Mission and Reputation

McGill University's web site states that its Mission is " the advancement of learning through teaching, scholarship and service to society". The web site goes on to state that the university strives to achieve these goals by providing excellent education, staying competitive in its research and academic programs and by giving back to society.

McGill os often one of Canada's top-ranked university among those offering medical and doctoral degrees; from 2003-2004, the University was ranked number one in Canada by the Maclean's University Rankings report. In the Times Higher Education (THE) - QS World University Rankings 2008, McGill University was ranked the best university in Canada, the second-best public university and 14th overall in North America, and 20th in the world. In Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities 2008, McGill ranked third in Canada, 42nd in the Americas, and 60th in the world.

McGill is also often recognized for its research programs.Research Infosource named McGill "Research University of the Year" in its 2003 and 2005 rankings of Canada's Top 50 Research Universities. In 2007, Research Infosource ranked McGill the second-best research university in the country, after the University of Toronto. They also ranked McGill University third in Canada in research-intensity and fourth in total-research funding, finding that McGill ranks in the top five universities in terms of research dollars per full-time faculty member and number of refereed publications per full-time faculty member. The study showed that research funding represents approximately $259,100 per faculty member, the fourth highest in the country.

McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cyrokine 'Interleukin-2') was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean. The invention of the world's first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang, an undergraduate student at the university. While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

History

James McGill, the original benefactor of McGill University.

James McGill was a wealthy English and French-speaking merchant in Quebec who, between the years of 1811 and 1813 created a will that left his 19 hectare (46 acre) estate and 10,000 pounds to the The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. Up until that time, the RIAL had been focusing mostly on administering Elementary school in the Quebec, but pursuant to the terms of McGill's will, the estate left to the Institution was applied to the creation of a university.

On March 31, 1821, McGill College received a Royal Charter from King George IV. The Charter provided that the College should be deemed and taken as a University, with the power of conferring degrees. In 1829 McGill College was officially inaugurated and classes began. The Montreal Medical Institution became the college's Faculty of Medicine, McGill's first academic unit. The Faculty of Medicine granted its first degree, a Doctor of Medicine and Surgery, in 1833. The Faculty of Medicine remained the school's only functioning faculty until 1843 when the Faculty of Arts commenced teaching in the newly constructed Arts Building and East Wing (Dawson Hall).

Chemistry & Physics Building, & Assembly Hall of Macdonald Campus (1906)

Sir John William Dawson, McGill's principal from 1855 to 1893, is often credited with transforming the school into a modern university. He recruited the aid of Montreal's wealthiest citizens, many of whom donated property and funding needed to construct the campus buildings. This expansion of the campus continued until 1920.

Women's education at McGill began in 1884, when Donald Smith, also known as Lord Strathcona, began funding separate lectures for women, given by university staff members. The first degrees granted to women at McGill were conferred in 1888. In 1899, the Royal Victoria College (RVC) opened as a residential college for women at McGill. Until the 1970s, all female undergraduate students, known as "Donaldas," were considered to be members of RVC .

In 1905, the university acquired a second campus when Sir William C. Macdonald, one of the university's major benefactors, endowed a college in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, 32 kilometres west of Montreal. Macdonald College, now known as the Macdonald Campus, opened to students in 1907, originally offering programs in agriculture, household science, and teaching.

McGill established the first post-secondary institutions in British Columbia to provide degree programs to the growing cities of Vancouver and Victoria. It created Victoria College in 1903, a two-year college offering first and second-year McGill courses in arts and science, which was the predecessor institution to the modern University of Victoria. The province's first university was incorporated in Vancouver in 1908 as the McGill University College of British Columbia. The private institution granted McGill degrees until it became the independent University of British Columbia in 1915.

The 1960s represented an era of large nationalist and labour mobilizations in Quebec, and McGill University became the sight of political unrest and controversy. McGill University had been since its founding a school taught primarily in English, despite the city of Montreal's large population of French speakers. The McGill français movement began in 1969, clamoring for a new McGill that would be francophone (French Speaking), pro-nationalist, and pro-worker. The movement was led by Stanley Gray, a political science professor from Ontario. It was argued that, since McGill received the lion's share of government funding, paid by a taxpayer base that was largely francophone, the university should equally be accessible to that segment of the population.

Gray led a demonstration of 10,000 trade unionists, leftist activists, CEGEP students, and even some McGill students, at the university's Roddick Gates on March 28, 1969. Protesters shouted "McGill français," "McGill aux Québécois," and "McGill aux travailleurs" (McGill for workers). However, the majority of students and faculty opposed such a position, and many of the protesters were arrested. Francophones currently make up approximately 18 percent of the student body, a goal set by the administration in the wake of the movement. Today, McGill is one of only three English-language universities in Quebec; fluency in French is not a requirement to attend. The Faculty of Law does, however, require all students to be "passively bilingual," meaning that all students must be able to read and understand spoken French—or English if the student is Francophone—since English or French may be used at any time in a course.

Despite political unrest, McGill remained, and still is, one of Canada's most prestigious and popular universities, and in the later half of the twentieth century came to be recognized for its research facilities and programs, as well as its general success in education.

Facilities

McGill's main campus is located in downtown Montreal. Most of its buildings are situated in a park-like campus located north of Sherbrooke Street and south of Pine Ave between Peel and Aylmer streets. The campus also extends west of Peel for several blocks, starting North of Docteur-Penfield. The campus is near the Peel and McGill metro stations. All of the major university buildings were constructed using local grey limestone, which serves as a unifying element.

McGill's downtown campus at night viewed from Mount Royal. The circular building in the foreground is the McIntyre Medical Sciences Building.

McGill's residence system is relatively small for a school of its size, housing approximately 2,400 undergraduate students and a handful of graduate students. Royal Victoria College, the second-largest residence at McGill, is a women's only dormitory. McGill's newest residence, aptly named New Residence Hall ("New Rez") is a converted four-star hotel located a few blocks east of campus. New Rez is the largest of the university's dormitories. Solin Hall is an apartment-style residence four metro stops from campus. The McGill Off-Campus Residence Experience (MORE) residences consist of a series of converted apartment buildings and houses, the largest of which is The Greenbriar, an apartment-style residence located across from the Milton Gates.

The Macdonald-Stewart Library Building houses the Schulich Library of Science and Engineering.

The downtown McGill campus sport and exercise facilities include: the McGill Sports Centre (which includes the Tomilson Fieldhouse and the Windsor Varsity Clinic), Molson Stadium, Memorial Pool, Tomlinson Hall, McConnell Arena, Forbes Field, many outdoor tennis courts and other extra-curricular arenas and faculties. The Macdonald Campus facilities, include an arena, a gymnasium, a pool, tennis courts, fitness centres and hundreds of acres of green space for regular use. The university's largest sporting venue, Molson Stadium, was constructed in 1914. It seats over 20,000 people and is the current home field of the Montreal Alouettes.

Repath Museum

McGill has a large library with over 10 different branches and numerous special collections, containing more than 6 million volumes. Aside from the Main Library building, there is the Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, the Education Library and Curriculum Resources Centre, the Edward Rosenthall Mathematics and Statistics Library, the Howard Ross Library of Management, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, the Islamic Studies Library, the Life Sciences Library, the Macdonald Campus Library, the Marvin Duchow Music Library, the Nahum Gelber Law Library, and the Schulich Library of Science and Engineering. Some of the special collections include the Blacker-Wood Collection, the Government Information Service and Walter Hitschfeld Geographic Information Centre. The university also has several museums on campus, including the The Lyman Entomological Museum which houses a vast insect collection and the Redpath Museum which houses collections from the disciplines of paleontology, zoology, mineralogy and ethnology.

McGill's Gault Nature Reserve spans over 10 square kilometres (2,471 acres) of forest land, the largest remaining remnant of the primeval forests of the St. Lawrence River Valley, on Mont St. Hilaire. The Morgan Arboretum, a 245 hectare forested reserve is located at the university's Macdonald campus.

Colleges and Institutes

McGill University has 13 different schools, known as faculties:

• Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
• Faculty of Arts
• Centre for Continuing Education
• Faculty of Dentistry
• Faculty of Education
• Faculty of Engineering
• Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
• Faculty of Law
• Desautels Faculty of Management
• Faculty of Medicine
• Schulich School of Music
• Faculty of Religious Studies
• Faculty of Science

In addition, the university has several institutes and centers, such as:

• Avian Science and Conservation Center
• Brace Center for Water Resources Management
• Center for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment
• Institute for Parasitology
• Center for Developing-Area Studies
• Center for East Asian Research
• Institute for Health and Social Policy
• Welcome to the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women
• Institute of Islamic Studies
• McGill Institute for the Study of Canada
• The Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain
• Evolution Education Research Centre (EERC)
• International Center for Youth Gambling Problems and High Risk Behavior
• Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies in Communications
• Center for Intelligent Machines
• McGill's Metal Processing Center
• McGill Polymer Research Center
• McGill Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism
• Centre for Intellectual Property Policy
• Quebec Research Centre of Private & Comparative Law
• McGill Center for Strategy Studies In Organizations
• McGill Finance Research Center
• The Center for Bone and Periodontal Research
• Center for Study of Host Resistance
• McGill Center for Studies in Aging
• Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology
• Center for Research on Religion
• Center for High Energy Physics/Astrophysics
• Center for Self-Assembled Chemicals
• Pulp and Paper Research Center

Programs

McGill offers over 340 academic programs in eleven faculties and over 250 doctoral and master's graduate degree programs. The University's undergraduate programs include Agricultural Sciences, Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering, Earth System & Physical Sciences, Education, Health Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry, Law, Religious Studies and Social Work. McGill's graduate level programs include Anthropology, Animal Science, Bioresource Engineering, E-Business,Experimental medicine, Information Technology, Management, Mining and Materials Engineering and Urban Planning. The university also offers advanced degrees in the fields of Law, Dentistry and Medicine.

McGill has extensive research programs as well as academics. According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, "Researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centers and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries." In the 2007-2008 academic year, $375,75.00 million Canadian dollars were allocated to research, with 147 international research and development partnerships, 180 contracts with industries and around 100 inventions were announced.

Student Life

McGill Campus, looking down from Mount Royal

McGill's students represent a diverse geographic and linguistic background. International students hail from about 160 different countries, a majority coming from the United States The growing number of American students attending McGill are attracted to the culture and dynamism of Montreal, the university's reputation, and the relatively low tuition in comparison to many top public and private universities in the United States.

The campus has an active students' union represented by the undergraduate Students' Society of McGill University (SSMU) and the Post-Graduate Students' Society of McGill University (PGSS). In addition, each faculty has its own student governing body. There are hundreds of clubs and student organizations at the university. Many of them are centered around McGill's student union building, the University Centre.

Student media

McGill has two English-language student-run newspapers: the McGill Daily, which is a financially independent publication, and the McGill Tribune, which is published through SSMU. The McGill Daily was first published in 1911. The Daily is the oldest daily student paper in Canada; it currently is published twice weekly. The Délit français is the Daily's French-language counterpart.McGill Foreign Affairs Review is a student-run journal about international affairs, and The Red Herring is the main satire magazine of Mcgill University. CKUT (90.3 FM) is the campus radio station. TV McGill is the University TV station, broadcasting on closed-circuit television and over the internet.

McGill Ice Hockey team, 1901

Greek life

While fraternities and sororities are not a large part of student life at McGill, some, including fraternities Alpha Epsilon Pi, Delta Upsilon, Sigma Alpha Mu, and Zeta Psi, and sororities Gamma Phi Beta and Alpha Omicron Pi, have been established for many years at the university. Phi Kappa Pi, Canada's only national fraternity, was founded at McGill and the University of Toronto in 1913 and continues to be active to this day. Events including Greek week, held annually during the first week of February, have been established to promote Greek life on campus. With just over 2% of the student body population participating, involvement is well below that of most American universities, but on par with most Canadian schools.

Sports

McGill and its alumni have featured significantly in the development of North American sports.

In 1865, the first recorded game of rugby in North America occurred in Montreal, between British army officers and McGill students. The first game of what would become American football was played between McGill and Harvard on May 14, 1874. In this game, rules adapted from rugby were used, which Harvard then spread throughout the Ivy League, giving rise to American football. McGill alumnus James Naismith invented basketball in 1891.

McGill is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) by the McGill Redmen (men's) and the McGill Martlets (women's). The school has over 50 varsity sports teams, ranging from Basketball, Football, Track and Field, Hockey, Figure skating, Lacrosse, and Rowing. The university also has several intramural sports including Ball Hockey, Soccer, Volleyball, and Badminton. The Sports Center on the main campus also offers health and exercise courses, as well as provides facilities for students to purpose exercise and related physical activities.

Traditions

McGill’s coat of arms.

There are several established traditions at McGill University, one of which is the collecting of songs created by alumni for their alma mater. These songs are stored and compiled into records of the times the songs were written in.

In British tradition, the University has its own patent of arms, which was officially created by England's Garter-King-at-Arms in 1922 and later was registered with the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada, which in heraldic terms is defined as "Argent three Martlets Gules, on a chief dancette of the second, an open book proper garnished or bearing the legend In Domino Confido in letters Sable between two crowns of the first. Motto: Grandescunt Aucta Labore.". The university's symbol, the martlet, is present on the coat of arms, as well as the school's official colors of red and white, and the official motto, Grandescunt Aucta Labore, Latin for: "By hard work, all things increase and grow."

Athletically, McGill has a long tradition of rivalry, particularly with the Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Animosity between rowing athletes at the two schools has inspired an annual boat race between the two universities in the spring of each year since 1997. The rivalry, which was once very intense, waned after Queen's pulled their football team out of the Ontario-Quebec Intercollegiate Football Conference in 2000; however, it returned in 2002 when it transferred to the annual home-and-home varsity hockey games between the two institutions, yet the McGill's/Queen's challenge also survives in the form of the annual boat race between the two schools.

Notable alumni

• Antony Alcock — involved in the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement signed in Belfast on April 10, 1998 (Good Friday) by the British and Irish governments and endorsed by most Northern Ireland political parties, ending The Troubles.
• Gerald Bull — former professor of mechanical engineering, expert on projectiles, designer of the Iraqi Project Babylon.
• Thomas Chang — developer of the world's first artificial cell.
• Ismail al-Faruqi — renowned Muslim philosopher and comparative religion scholar.
• Val Logsdon Fitch — Nobel Prize winning Physicist.
• S. I. Hayakawa — linguist, U.S. senator, former president of San Francisco State University.
• Jennifer Heil — 2006 Olympicgold medalist in freestyle skiing.
• David Hunter Hubel — Nobel Prize winner in Physiology.
• Charline Labonté — 2006 Olympic gold medalist in Women's Ice hockey
• Rudolph Marcus — Chemist.
• Mohan Munasinghe — winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
• James A. Naismith — inventor of the game of basketball.
• Justin Trudeau — son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

References

• Axelrod, Paul. "McGill University on the Landscape of Canadian Higher Education: Historical Reflections." Higher Education Perspectives 1 (1996-97).
• Coleman, Brian. "McGill, British Columbia." McGill Journal of Education 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1976).
• Collard, Andrew. The McGill You Knew: An Anthology of Memories, 1920-1960. Toronto: Longman Canada, 1975.
• Frost, Stanley B. The History of McGill in Relation to the Social, Economic and Cultural Aspects of Montreal and Quebec (Montreal: McGill University. 1979).
• Frost, Stanley B. McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning. Vols I.(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980)ISBN 9780773503533
• Frost, Stanley B. McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning. Vol II.(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984)ISBN 9780773504226
• Gillett, Margaret. We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill. Montreal: Eden Press, 1981.
• Markell, H. Keith The Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 1948-1978 (Montreal: Faculty of Religious Studies, 1979)
• McNally, Peter F. McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning (1970-2002)' Vol III(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press Not yet published.)
• Young, Brian J. The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1996 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, June 1, 2000)ISBN 9780773520493 and ISBN 9780773520509

External links

• Official website
• Pictures and Info on McGill buildings
• AUCC profile

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