McGill's Arts Building, the oldest building on campus
McGill University, established in 1821, is in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. One of the oldest universities in Canada, it has long been considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in the country and among the finest in North America.
Known to some as "The Harvard of the North", McGill is well-known for its pioneering research in the medical sciences, chemistry, physics and biology. The university is also famous for its high standard of undergraduate education and has an established history in the humanities, social sciences, law and physical education. In the past, McGill has often been compared with the best U.S. schools (The Gourman Report).
Noted for being a research-intensive university, it frequently garners the most research dollars nationwide (per faculty) from federal and provincial sources of funding (including CFI, NSERC and other organizations). The university also has the distinction of having the highest publication intensity in the country for many years, and this was one of the factors leading to it being named Research University of the Year in 2003. [1]
For a long time, McGill was considered Canada's best university. In recent years however, the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto have outpaced McGill in many respects. This change is linked to the decline of Montreal's economic importance relative to Toronto and Vancouver and the greater ease of raising money in the latter two cities. McGill's decline is also due in part to severe underfunding by the Quebec government in the 1990s.
However, since 2001, McGill's financial standing has been steadily improving, due to private donations and matching funds from the provincial government.
The Quebec government has long encouraged international students from selected countries (such as some members of La Francophonie) to attend their universities over students from other Canadian provinces. Since 1996 it has been more expensive for an out-of-province student to attend McGill than it is for many foreigners from countries that have special agreements with Quebec. This, in addition to McGill's international reputation, partially accounts for why McGill has a high percentage of foreign students. Nevertheless, owing to Quebec government subsidies, some students paying out-of-province tuition find it less expensive to attend McGill than universities in their home province.
In 1813, James McGill bequeathed his 46 acre (190 m²) estate and 10,000 pounds to "the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning." This institution established McGill University in 1821. Later, in 1905, Sir William Macdonald helped develop Macdonald College, which currently houses research and classes in botany, agricultural science, environmental science and the like.
McGill has produced 122 Rhodes Scholars, the most of any Canadian university.
McGill's class of 1952 includes William Shatner, who portrayed Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek. Students have (unofficially) named McGill's Student Union building after him.
The McGill Daily, founded in 1911, is the longest-running student newspaper in the British Commonwealth.
McGill's MBA program has been consistently been ranked among the top 40 in the world by the Economist and Financial Times.
McGill has consistently ranked among the top four medical/doctoral universities nationwide, in the Maclean's rankings, an annual ranking of Canadian universities.
McGill's Redpath Museum, built in 1892, is the oldest building built specifically as a museum in North America. Its natural history collections boast material collected by the same individuals who founded the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Smithsonian.
Donald Olding Hebb (psychology) - father of cognitive psychobiology. Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence: developed what has become known as Hebbian learning, a fundamental idea in AI.
Wilder Penfield (neurosurgery) - neurosurgery pioneer, first director of the world renowned Montreal Neurological Institute which is affiliated with McGill University
It is a little known fact is that the inventions of hockey, basketball and North American football are all related to McGill in some way. The first game of North American football was played between McGill and Harvard Universities in 1874. During World War II, the International Labour Organization was headquartered at McGill.
In terms of contributions to computing, MUSIC/SP, a piece of software for mainframes, once popular among universities and colleges around the world at its time, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, one of the pre-WWW search engines. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software.
