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Founded by James McGill in 1821.1
Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning
The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (RIAL) was created in 1801 under an Act of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada (41 George III Chapter 17), An Act for the establishment of Free Schools and the Advancement of Learning in this Province. The RIAL was initially authorized to operate two new Royal Grammar Schools, in Quebec City and in Montreal. This was a turning point for public education in Lower Canada as the schools were created by legislation, which showed the government's willingness to support the costs of education and even the salary of a schoolmaster. This was an important first step in the creation of non-denominational schools. When James McGill died in 1813, his bequest was administered by the RIAL.
In 1846, the Royal Grammar School in Quebec City closed, and the one in Montreal merged with the High School of Montreal. By the mid-19th century, the RIAL had lost control of the other eighty-two grammar schools it had administered. However, in 1853 it took over the High School of Montreal from the school's board of directors and continued to operate it until 1870. Thereafter, its sole remaining purpose was to administer the McGill bequest on behalf of the private college. The RIAL continues to exist today; it is the corporate identity that runs the university and its various constituent bodies, including the former Macdonald College (now Macdonald Campus), the Montreal Neurological Institute, and the Royal Victoria College (the former women's college turned residence). Since the revised Royal Charter of 1852, the trustees of the RIAL are the board of governors of McGill University.
McGill College
James McGill was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on October 6, 1744. He was a successful merchant in Quebec, having matriculated into the University of Glasgow in 1756. Soon afterwards, McGill left for North America to explore the business opportunities there, especially in the fur trade. McGill was also a slave owner, and the McGill household enslaved at least five Black and Indigenous people. Between 1811 and 1813, he drew up a will leaving his "Burnside estate", a 19-hectare (47-acre) tract of rural land and £10,000 to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning.
As a condition of the bequest, the land and funds had to be used for the establishment of a "University or College, for the purposes of Education and the Advancement of Learning in the said Province." The will specified a private, constituent college bearing his name would have to be established within ten years of his death; otherwise, the bequest would revert to the heirs of his wife.
On March 31, 1821, after protracted legal battles with the Desrivières family (the heirs of his wife), McGill College received a royal charter from King George IV. The charter provided the college should be deemed and taken as a University, with the power of conferring degrees. The third Lord Bishop of Quebec, The Right Reverend George Mountain, (DCL, Oxford) was appointed the first principal of McGill College and a professor of divinity. He is also responsible for the creation of Bishop's University in 1843 and Bishop's College School in 1836 in the Eastern Townships.
Campus expansions
Although McGill College received its Royal Charter in 1821, it was inactive until 1829 when the Montreal Medical Institution, which had been founded in 1823, became the college's first academic unit and Canada's first medical school. The Faculty of Medicine granted its first degree, a Doctorate of Medicine and Surgery, in 1833; this was also the first medical degree to be awarded in Canada.
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).
The Faculty of Law was founded in 1848 and is also the oldest of its kind in the nation. In 1896, the McGill School of Architecture was the second architecture school to be established in Canada, six years after the University of Toronto in 1890. Sir John William Dawson, McGill's principal from 1855 to 1893, is often credited with transforming the school into a modern University.
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William Spier designed the addition of the West Wing of the Arts Building for William Molson, 1861. Alexander Francis Dunlop designed major alterations to the East Wing of McGill College (now called the Arts Building, McGill University) for Prof. Bovey and the Science Dept., 1888. George Allan Ross designed the Pathology Building, 1922–23; the Neurological Institute, 1933; Neurological Institute addition 1938 at McGill University. Jean Julien Perrault (architect) designed the McTavish Street residence for Charles E. Gravel, which is now called David Thompson House (1934).
Women's education
Women's education at McGill began in 1884 when Donald Smith (later the Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal), 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 with Hilda D. Oakeley as the head. Until the 1970s, all female undergraduate students, known as "Donaldas," were considered to be members of RVC. Beginning in the autumn of 2010, the newer Tower section of Royal Victoria College became a mixed gender dormitory, whereas the older West Wing remains strictly for women. Both the Tower and the West Wing of Royal Victoria College form part of the university's residence system.
McGill and World War I
Many students and alumni enlisted in the first wave of patriotic fervour that swept the nation in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, but in the spring of 1915—after the first wave of heavy Canadian casualties at Ypres—Hamilton Gault, the founder of the Canadian regiment and a wealthy Montreal businessman, was faced with a desperate shortage of troops. When he reached out to his friends at home for support, over two hundred were commissioned from the ranks, and many more would serve as soldiers throughout the war. On their return to Canada after the war, Major George McDonald and Major George Currie formed the accounting firm McDonald Currie, which later became one of the founders of Price Waterhouse Coopers. Captain Percival Molson was killed in action in July 1917. Percival Molson Memorial Stadium at McGill is named in his honour.
The War Memorial Hall (more generally known as Memorial Hall) is a landmark building on the campus of McGill University. At the dedication ceremony, the Governor General of Canada (Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis) laid the cornerstone. Dedicated on October 6, 1946, the Memorial Hall and adjoining Memorial Pool honour students who had enlisted and died in the First World War, and in the Second World War. In Memorial Hall, there are two Stained Glass Regimental badges, World War I and World War II Memorial Windows by Charles William Kelsey c. 1950/1.
A war memorial window (1950) by Charles William Kelsey in the McGill War Memorial Hall depicts the figure of St. Michael and the badges of the Navy, Army and the Air Force.
A Great War memorial window featuring Saint George and a slain dragon at the entrance to the Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art is dedicated to the memory of 23 members of the McGill chapter of Delta Upsilon who gave their lives in the Great War.
There is a memorial archway at Macdonald Campus, two additional floors added to the existing Sir Arthur Currie gymnasium, a hockey rink and funding for an annual Memorial Assembly. A Book of Remembrance on a marble table contains the names of those lost in both World Wars. On November 11, 2012, the McGill Remembers website launched; the University War Records Office collected documents between 1940 and 1946 related to McGill students, staff and faculty in the Second World War.
Founder of universities and colleges
McGill was instrumental in founding several major universities and colleges. It established the first post-secondary institutions in British Columbia to provide degree programs to the growing cities of Vancouver and Victoria. It chartered Victoria College in 1903 as an affiliated junior college of McGill, offering first and second-year courses in arts and science, until it became today's University of Victoria. British Columbia'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.
Dawson College began in 1945 as a satellite campus of McGill to absorb the anticipated influx of students after World War II. Many students in their first three years in the Faculty of Engineering took courses at Dawson College to relieve the McGill campus for the later two years for their degree course. Dawson eventually became independent of McGill and evolved into the first English CEGEP in Quebec. Another CEGEP, John Abbott College, was established in 1971 at the campus of McGill's Macdonald College.
Both founders of the University of Alberta, Premier Alexander Cameron Rutherford of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, were also McGill alumni. In addition, McGill alumni and professors, Sir William Osler and Howard Atwood Kelly, were among the four founders and early faculty members of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Osler eventually became the first Physician-in-Chief of the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, US in 1889. He led the creation of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893. Other McGill alumni founded the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry in the 1880s. By 1961, McGill had an enrolment of 8,507 students and 925 graduate students. Since the 1960s McGill has experienced government funding curtailment. According to a 2016 report, McGill had a $1.3 billion deferred maintenance bill. The report also identified that 73 per cent of the university's buildings were in poor or very poor shape.
Quotas on Jewish students
McGill University, alongside other universities like Sir George Williams University (now part of Concordia University) and the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, had longstanding quotas in place from 1920 to the late 1960s on the number of Jews admitted to the respective universities. The quota limited the Jewish student population in medicine and law to at most 10 per cent. The only Montreal-based university that did not impose such quotas was the Université de Montréal.
Involvement in MKUltra and Human Experimentation
On June 1, 1951, representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA) held a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Montreal hotel with British and Canadian officials with the aim of discussing intelligence regarding rumours of brainwashing techniques developed by the Soviet Union. One guest at the meeting was Donald O. Hebb, director of McGill University's psychology program: during the meeting, he suggested that the Soviets were able to manipulate prisoners through sensory deprivation techniques and the use of isolation. Three months later, Hebb received a grant from the Canadian Department of National Defence to conduct classified sensory deprivation experiments: these initial experiments, conducted on students at the university, were voluntary and paid their subjects 20 dollars per day. The experiments proved fruitful, as Hebb was able to make students who previously trusted in science now believing that it was dishonest, as well as being convinced of the existence of ghosts.
Prior to conducting the experiments, Hebb had initially been under the impression that his work was meant to eventually train soldiers to resist these techniques when captured, but realized early on that it also had implications for interrogation, as it made potential interrogatees more prone to suggestion. Four of the subjects had also remarked during the experiments that they were experiencing torture; none of the subjects experienced more than two to three days of isolation, as Hebb was concerned about the scientific ethics of continuing the experiments for a longer period of time. In spite of this, beginning in 1957 and with significant financial support from the CIA, fellow McGill researcher Donald Ewen Cameron sought to explore the effects of one to two months of continuous isolation and sensory deprivation. Privately, Cameron indicated that his ultimate goal was to seemingly rewrite the human mind.
Rather than conducting voluntary experiments, Cameron instead tested on patients at the university's Allan Memorial Institute without their consent, even when they had only complained of minor issues such as anxiety. Cameron also combined the techniques with enhanced electroconvulsive therapy to cause amnesia, shocking the patients twelve times per day for a month (compared to the recommended dosage of six times per day for four days). To further induce suggestibility, he dosed them with a large amount of drugs without their knowledge, including LSD and PCP. With the university's consent, he partially renovated the institute building to expand his experiments, including adding a soundproofed pitch-black room to the basement and remodeling the horse stables into specialized "isolation boxes" with a similar structure. The latter had patients kept within them for weeks at a time, with one patient being kept there for 35 consecutive days. Cameron also maintained "sleep rooms:" there, patients would be induced to sleep for 20 to 22 hours per day, being turned over by the institute's nurses every two hours to prevent bed sores and only wakened for meals or to use the washroom. The nurses were not allowed to tell or indicate to the patients in any way how long they had been in the room, nor were the patients permitted to speak to the nurses. In most cases, patients in the sleep rooms would spend between 15 and 30 days there, though the stays could span as much as 65 days. Lastly, to prevent one group of patients from leaving their room, Cameron dosed them with curare, paralyzing them until the experiment was over. The experiments were funded until 1961; they were then directly cited by the CIA in a 1963 interrogation techniques manual, which explicitly clarified that the techniques themselves were illegal and required approval from superior officers.
In January 2019, Julie Tanny filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of her deceased father, Charles Tanny, suing the U.S. federal government, the Government of Canada, and McGill University as defendants. In a statement, the university denied responsibility, claiming that Cameron was an independent employee. On October 2, 2023, following an appeal, the claims against the U.S. government were dismissed with prejudice by the Quebec Court of Appeal due to sovereign immunity. The claims against the remaining defendants were certified as a class-action lawsuit on July 31, 2025.
Controversial protests and initiatives
McGill University was the subject of controversy when in January 2023, McGill University's Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) hosted an event, titled "Sex vs. Gender (Identity) Debate In the United Kingdom and the Divorce of LGB from T". It was led by McGill alumnus Robert Wintemute. Transgender activist groups stormed the talk, which was led by a speaker associated with a group they claimed was "notoriously transphobic and trans-exclusionary." The talk was cancelled shortly after it started.
On October 10, 2025, the McGill University Association of University Professors (MAUT) made the decision to implement an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The resolution mandated that McGill cease its partnerships with Israeli universities.
From Wikipedia’s article on McGill University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4