McGill University

McGill University is a publicly funded, research-intensive, non-denominational, co-educational, international university located in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821, McGill is considered to be the second best university in Canada and amongst the top universities in the world.

Facts and trivia

• McGill professors have been facing lower compensation than their peers, which in part caused the departure of numerous renowned faculty members. http://www.reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/Rep/r3106/underpaid.html This issue has been improving in recent years.
• McGill was the first non-denominational university in the British Empire.
• It is one of only two Canadian universities holding a membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization comprising top-tier North American research universities. (The other Canadian university member is the University of Toronto.)
• McGill is one of only two Canadian universities with membership in Universitas 21, an international assocation of research-driven universities. (The other Canadian member is the University of British Columbia.)
• McGill has four Nobel Prize-winning graduates, and three more Nobel laureates who were former faculty/staff.
• McGill is the alma mater to two Canadian prime ministers.
• McGill has produced 125 Rhodes Scholars, more than any other Canadian University
• In the motion picture arts, McGill has produced 7 Academy Awards winners.
• McGill's MBA program has been been ranked 39th in the world and 4th in Canada by the Financial Times in 2005.http://specials.ft.com/spdocs/be2005_globalmba_2005.pdf
• McGill has consistently ranked among the top 4 medical/doctoral universities nationwide, in the Maclean's rankings, an annual ranking of Canadian universities.
• 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.
• McGill's Bellairs Research Institute & campus on the island of Barbados serves as Canada's only teaching and research facility in the tropics. These facilities are used by such entities as the Canadian Space Agency for research.
• McGill's Redpath Museum, commissioned in 1880 and opened in 1882, 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.
• It is a little known fact 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 in 1874.
• Established in 1871, McGill's mining engineering program is the oldest in Canada. It is the second oldest program of its kind in North America, behind the one offered at Colorado School of Mines.
• 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.
• The university is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport by the McGill Redmen (men's) and the McGill Martlets (women's).