"[2] The will specified a private, constituent college[12] 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.

[33] 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.

[2] 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.

[41] Jean Julien Perrault (architect) designed the McTavish Street residence for Charles E. Gravel, which is now called David Thompson House (1934).

[44] 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.

[50] Dawson College began in 1945 as a satellite campus of McGill to absorb the anticipated influx of students after World War II.

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.

The community immediately east of University Street and south of Pine Avenue is known as Milton-Park, where a large number of students reside.

[71] The rest of the campus was essentially a cow pasture, a situation similar to the few other Canadian universities and early American colleges of the age.

[72] The university's athletic facilities, including Molson Stadium, are on Mount Royal, near the residence halls and the Montreal Neurological Institute.

[82] In 2019, McGill announced the construction of a new campus for its Faculty of Medicine in Gatineau, Quebec, which will allow students from the Outaouais region to complete their undergraduate medical education locally and in French.

The project will expand facilities to two separate campuses[86] and consolidate the various hospitals of the MUHC on the site of an old CP rail yard adjacent to the Vendôme Metro station.

This site, known as Glen Yards, comprises 170,000 square metres (1,800,000 sq ft) and spans portions of Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood and the city of Westmount.

[89] Other student projects include The Flat: Bike Collective, which promotes alternative transportation, and the Farmer's Market, which occurs during the fall harvest.

In heraldic terms, the coat of arms is described as follows: "Argent three Martlets Gules, on a chief dancette of the second, an open book proper garnished or bearing the legend In Domino Confido in letters Sable between two crowns of the first.

[138] Tuition fees vary significantly depending on the faculties that aspiring (graduate and undergraduate) students choose as well as their citizenship.

[143] For out-of-province first year undergraduate students, a high school average of 95 per cent is required to receive a guaranteed one-year entrance scholarship.

[146][147] The university has joined Project Hero, a scholarship program cofounded by General (Ret'd) Rick Hillier for the families of fallen Canadian Forces members.

[158] The movement was led by Stanley Gray, a political science professor (and possibly unaware of government plans after the 1968 legislation founding the Université du Québec).

McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization.

[191] While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

[192] Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

[209] SSMU supports more than 250 student-run membership clubs, which range from athletics, health and wellness, arts, and culture groups to professional development, charitable, volunteer, and political associations.

McGill was also chosen as the first University to expand to outside of the United States for several Greek letter organizations, for instance, with the Québec Alpha chapter of Phi Delta Theta in 1902.

[231] The downtown McGill campus sport and exercise facilities include: the McGill Sports Centre (which includes the Tomlinson Fieldhouse and the Windsor Varsity Clinic),[232] Molson Stadium, Memorial Pool, Tomlinson Hall, McConnell Arena, Forbes Field, many outdoor tennis courts and other extra-curricular arenas and faculties.

[233] The Macdonald Campus facilities include an arena, a gymnasium, a pool, tennis courts, fitness centres and hundreds of acres of green space for regular use.

[240] On March 3, 1875, the first organized indoor hockey game was played at Montreal's Victoria Skating Rink between two nine-player teams, including James Creighton and several McGill University students.

[259] McGill and Harvard are also athletic rivals, as demonstrated by the biennial Harvard-McGill rugby games, alternately played in Montreal and Cambridge.

In the sciences, McGill graduates and faculty have received a total of 12 Nobel Prizes in disciplines ranging from Physiology, Medicine, Economics, Chemistry and Physics.

[21] Other notable sporting alumni include the inventor of basketball James Naismith,[281] influential baseball statistician Allan Roth,[282] the first medical doctor to win a Super Bowl Laurent Duvernay-Tardif,[283] and Triple Gold Club member Mike Babcock.