University of Toronto

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Toronto sits at the center of one of the most consequential stretches of scientific history ever produced by a single institution. On a patch of downtown Toronto ground, researchers discovered insulin in 1921, identified the stem cell in 1963, and performed the world's first successful single-lung transplant in 1981. Those are not three separate stories. They share an address.

  Founded in 1827 as King's College by royal charter from King George IV, this institution started as a religious outpost of the British colonial project in Upper Canada. Nearly two centuries later it enrolls more than 100,000 students, operates three campuses across the Greater Toronto Area, and holds membership in the Association of American Universities , one of only two institutions outside the United States ever admitted alongside McGill University in Montreal.

  How did a colonial Church of England college, built to counter the spread of American republicanism, become the largest post-secondary institution in Canada and one of the most cited research universities in the world? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. The Colonial Founding

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  John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York (the settlement that would become Toronto), had a specific fear in mind when he pushed for a colonial college. Simcoe was Oxford-educated and had fought in the American Revolutionary War. He believed that without a proper institution of higher learning in British North America, republican ideas from the United States would fill the vacuum. The Upper Canada Executive Committee formally recommended the establishment of a college in York in 1798.

  The charter, issued on the 15th of March 1827 by King George IV, was explicit in its purpose: education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature. The man most responsible for obtaining that charter was John Strachan, a deeply influential figure who would become the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto. Strachan lobbied intensively for the college and became its first president. Under his leadership, King's College was tightly bound to the Church of England and to the ruling colonial elite known as the Family Compact.

  Reformist politicians fought back. They regarded church control over colonial institutions as incompatible with responsible government. In 1849, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King's College as the University of Toronto and cut its ties with the church. Strachan, having anticipated the decision, had already resigned a year earlier, departing to found Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. The secularized university created University College as its nondenominational teaching branch. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building had stood on the present site of Queen's Park.

• 3. Building the Institution

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  A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library. The university restored the building and replenished its collections within two years, a recovery that signaled something about the institution's character.

  Over the decades that followed, the university assembled a collegiate system by drawing ecclesiastical institutions into federation. Knox College, a Presbyterian seminary, and Wycliffe College, a low church institution, had long encouraged students to study non-divinity subjects at University College; both entered formal federation by 1890. Victoria University, a Methodist school originally in Cobourg, resisted at first, but a financial incentive in 1890 brought it in. Trinity College, Strachan's own creation, joined in 1904, decades after his death. St. Michael's College, a Roman Catholic college founded by the Basilian Fathers, followed in 1910. The system that emerged resembled the collegiate models of Oxford and Cambridge.

  The same era produced a sequence of institutional firsts for Canada. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada's first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry, founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as its first dean, was the country's first university faculty devoted to forest science. Women had been admitted since 1884. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both institutions retain close ties with the university today as independent entities.

• 4. Breakthroughs in Biology

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  Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921. That finding is routinely described as among the most significant events in the history of medicine, and nothing in the century since has diminished that assessment.

  The stem cell was identified at Toronto in 1963, which formed the basis for bone marrow transplantation and every subsequent line of research on adult and embryonic stem cells. Researchers at the university later identified pancreatic and retinal stem cells, and in 1997 made the first identification of the cancer stem cell, a discovery that has since extended to leukemia, brain tumours, and colorectal cancer. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981. The first nerve transplant followed in 1988, and the first double-lung transplant in 1989.

  Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index, the infant cereal Pablum, and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. Researchers isolated the genes responsible for Fanconi anemia, cystic fibrosis, and early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Between 1914 and 1972, the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, which later became part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis; research there included the development of gel electrophoresis. Today, more than 5,000 principal investigators reside within two kilometres of the university's grounds in Toronto's Discovery District, conducting roughly one billion dollars of medical research annually.

• 5. Beyond Biology

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  The physics department built the first practical electron microscope in 1938. During the Second World War, the university developed the G-suit, a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter pilots and later adopted by astronauts. In 1963, an asteroid discovered at the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill was named 2104 Toronto in the university's honour. In 1972, studies on Cygnus X-1 produced the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes.

  A pioneer in computing, the university designed and built UTEC, one of the world's first operational computers. It later purchased Ferut, the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. AlexNet, regarded as the first widely recognized application of deep convolutional networks in large-scale visual recognition, was developed at Toronto. Multi-touch technology was also developed here, finding its way into handheld devices, high-end drawing monitors, and collaboration walls. The theory of NP-completeness, a foundational concept in computer science, was developed at the university.

  Toronto astronomers have discovered the Uranian moons Caliban and Sycorax, the dwarf galaxies Andromeda I, II, and III, and the supernova SN 1987A. The AeroVelo Atlas, which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013, was developed by the university's students and graduates and tested in Vaughan. The university's SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

• 6. The Toronto School

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  Eric A. Havelock and Harold Innis laid the groundwork for what became known as the Toronto School, a body of thought described as the theory of the primacy of communication in the structuring of human cultures and the structuring of the human mind. Edmund Snow Carpenter, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan extended that foundation into a globally influential intellectual movement.

  Since 1963, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, housed in the Faculty of Information, has carried the mandate for teaching and advancing the school's ideas. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography has been based at the university since 1959, and the Collected Works of Erasmus since 1969. The Records of Early English Drama collects surviving documentary evidence of dramatic arts in pre-Puritan England, and the Dictionary of Old English compiles the vocabulary of the language from the Anglo-Saxon period.

  Victoria University's literary journal Acta Victoriana is the oldest active literary journal in Canada and provided first publication credits to Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye. University College's student newspaper The Gargoyle served as an early training ground for journalist Naomi Klein and musician and comedian Paul Shaffer. Hart House Theatre introduced the Little Theatre Movement from Europe to Canada. Among the performing artists it cultivated were Donald Sutherland and Lorne Michaels. Three members of the Group of Seven painters served as set designers for the theatre.

• 7. Campus and Architecture

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  Lord Dufferin, visiting in 1872, remarked that until he reached Toronto he had not been aware that so magnificent a specimen of architecture existed upon the American continent. He was speaking of University College's main building, completed in 1857 in an eclectic blend of Richardsonian Romanesque and Norman architectural styles designed by architect Frederick William Cumberland. The building was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1968.

  The St. George campus encompasses 55.8 hectares in downtown Toronto, bounded roughly by Bay Street to the east, Bloor Street to the north, Spadina Avenue to the west, and College Street to the south. Convocation Hall, built in 1907, is recognizable for its domed roof and Ionic-pillared rotunda. The Soldiers' Tower stands 143 feet tall and houses a 51-bell carillon played on Remembrance Day and during convocation. The most significant example of Brutalist architecture on campus is the Robarts Library complex, built in 1972 and opened in 1973, featuring a towering 14-storey concrete structure that cantilevers above open space and mature trees.

  The Scarborough campus opened in 1964 on 300 acres in what was then an independent municipality east of Toronto. The Mississauga campus was established in 1967 as Erindale College on 225 acres of protected forested land along the Credit River, approximately 33 kilometres southwest of the St. George campus. Both suburban campuses together make up nearly half the university's undergraduate student body. In 2006, the Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building on the St. George campus brought a high-tech architectural style of glass and steel to the grounds, designed by British architect Norman Foster.

• 8. Alumni and Legacy

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  Five Canadian prime ministers studied at the University of Toronto, among them William Lyon Mackenzie King and Lester B. Pearson. Seventeen justices of the Supreme Court of Canada are graduates. The university counts thirteen Nobel laureates among those who studied or taught there, along with six Turing Award winners, 100 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist.

  In business, alumni include Ted Rogers of Rogers Communications, Jeffrey Skoll of eBay, and BlackBerry's Jim Balsillie. Writers Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje attended, as did journalists Malcolm Gladwell and Naomi Klein. Film directors David Cronenberg, Norman Jewison, and Atom Egoyan are graduates. Computer scientists Alfred Aho and Brian Kernighan, whose work shaped the foundations of modern programming, both studied there. In 2021, a survey found that companies founded by University of Toronto alumni generate output roughly equivalent to one-quarter of Canadian GDP.

  The single largest philanthropic gift in Canadian history was made to the university on the 24th of September 2020, when Toronto-based philanthropists James and Louise Temerty donated to the Faculty of Medicine, which was subsequently renamed the Temerty Faculty of Medicine in their honour. The previous record for the university had been set in 2019 when Onex CEO Gerry Schwartz and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000 square foot innovation centre known as the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. In December 2021, the university launched the Defy Gravity campaign, the largest fundraising campaign in Canadian history.