McGill University Diploma: A Montreal Institution Told Through Places
McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, established in 1821. Its downtown campus is at the foot of Mount Royal, where the university grounds meet the city. The campus is not a product of a single architectural period, but a record of the successive stages of McGill’s development in its teaching buildings, museums and research spaces. They are convenient places to get a sense of how the institution grew.
The university had its origins on Burnside, the country estate of Scottish-born merchant James McGill. At his death in 1813 he left 46 acres of land and £10,000 for the foundation of a college. A royal charter followed in 1821 but legal wrangles delayed access to the property and funds.
Medicine gave the young institution its first teaching basis. In 1829 the Montreal Medical Institution was absorbed into McGill, and the university’s first degree was conferred in 1833 on medical graduate William Leslie Logie. The Faculty of Arts, founded in 1843, contributed to the expansion of an institution historically focused on medical education.
McGill was growing, which meant new building and altered access. women entered its Faculty of Arts in 1884, and were at first taught separately from the men. The first female graduates received their degrees in 1888.
Beyond the Downtown Campus
The Royal Victoria College, opened in 1899 with the help of railroad financier Donald Smith, provided teaching and residential accommodation for women. Its history is a reflection of the gradual and often restrictive process by which women came to have a place in university life. Mixed classes changed as time passed, rather than being part of the first admissions.
Physicist Ernest Rutherford worked on radioactivity at McGill between 1898 and 1907. His work there helped to establish the theory of radioactive transformation and contributed to the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Some of his experimental apparatus is preserved in the University’s Rutherford Collection.
Another key site was opened in 1934: the Montreal Neurological Institute. It was founded by the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and combined treating patients with scientific investigation, placing clinical problems at the heart of brain research.
McGill’s geography extends west to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, home of Macdonald College, which opened in 1907. Today you can enroll to obtain a McGill University Diploma at the Macdonald Campus that is devoted to agricultural and environmental sciences and has farmland, greenhouses and an arboretum. The breadth of the university’s educational setting is shown in these working landscapes and in the downtown laboratories and lecture rooms, where classroom study is connected with food production, environmental questions and practical research.