Carleton University
Carleton University is an English-language public research university in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, the institution originally operated as a private, non-denominational evening college to serve returning World War II veterans. Carleton was chartered as a university by the provincial government in 1952 through The Carleton University Act, which was then amended in 1957, giving the institution its current name. The university is named after the now-dissolved Carleton County, which included the city of Ottawa at the time the university was founded.
Carleton is organized into five faculties and with more than 65 degree programs. It has several specialized institutions, including the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, the Carleton School of Journalism, the School of Public Policy and Administration, and the Sprott School of Business.
As of 2025, Carleton yearly enrols more than 25,000 undergraduate and 5,000 graduate students. Carleton has a 150-acre campus located west of Old Ottawa South, close to The Glebe and Confederation Heights. It is bounded to the North by the Rideau Canal and Dow's Lake and to the South by the Rideau River. Carleton has more than 188,000 alumni worldwide, seven have become Rhodes Scholars, two Pulitzer Prize awardees, two Academy Award winners, eight Killam Prize winners, and several recipients of the Order of Canada. The university is affiliated with over 50 Royal Society Fellows and members and 3 Nobel laureates. Carleton is also home to 27 Canada Research Chairs, one Canada 150 Chair, 14 IEEE Fellows and 11 3M National Teaching Award winners.
Carleton competes in the U Sports league as the Carleton Ravens. Over the past 20 seasons, the Ravens basketball program has won 20 national titles.
History
Carleton College (1942–1957)
Discussions on establishing a second post-secondary institution in Ottawa began in the fall of 1938 among a committee of members from the local YMCA chapter, to create a school accommodating the needs of Ottawa's non-Catholic population. While the Second World War ended the committee's activities, a new committee was organized by Henry Marshall Tory as the Ottawa Association for the Advancement of Learning at a meeting held in December 1941, with formal incorporation in June 1942.Established in 1942 as Carleton College, a non-denominational institution, the school began offering evening courses in rented classrooms at the High School of Commerce, now part of the Glebe Collegiate Institute. Classes offered during the first academic year included English, French, history, algebra, trigonometry, chemistry, physics, and biology. With the end of the war in 1945 and return of veterans from the frontlines, the college experienced an upsurge in student enrolment during the 1945–46 academic year, accepting 2,200 new students.
To accommodate them, the school rented facilities in various buildings throughout the city, including classrooms at the Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Ottawa Technical High School, and the basements of several local churches. The academic offerings expanded with the establishment of the Faculty of Arts and Science, and new coursework in journalism and engineering.
In 1946, the college opened its first campus at the corner of Lyon Street and First Avenue in The Glebe neighbourhood. The four-story building was the former location of the Ottawa Ladies' College, which was purchased during the Second World War for use as barracks for the Canadian Women's Army Corps. Carleton's first degrees were conferred in 1946 to graduates of its Journalism and Public Administration programs.
For nearly a decade, the college operated on a shoestring budget, using funds raised mainly through community initiatives and student fees. Fees during the school's first academic year from 1942 to 43 were about $10.00 per course for first-year students, equivalent to $ in dollars. Fundraising efforts by the college's president, Henry Marshall Tory, raised $1 million from donors throughout the Ottawa area, with half of the proceeds going towards the purchase of the new building, and the other to endow the college. Carleton's faculty was composed largely of part-time professors who worked in the public service, some of whom eventually left the government for full-time tenure positions.
In 1952, the Carleton College Act was passed by the Ontario Legislature, changing the school's corporate name to Carleton College and conferring upon it the power to grant university degrees. Carleton thus became the province's first private, non-sectarian college. The governance system was modelled on the provincial University of Toronto Act of 1906 which established a bicameral system of university government consisting of a Faculty Senate, responsible for academic policy, and a Board of Governors composed of local community members, exercising exclusive control over the institution's finances and formal authority over all other matters. The President, appointed by the Board, was to provide a link between the two bodies and to perform institutional leadership.
Though the acquisition of land tracts now part of the current campus began in 1947, it was only in 1952 that the college gained possession of the entire 150-acre property, a significant portion of which was donated by Harry Stevenson Southam, a prominent Ottawa business magnate. In March 1956, the college released a 75-year master plan for the development of the campus in stages, with the first stage costing an estimated $4.2 million, equivalent to $ in dollars, foreseeing the development of academic buildings, student residences, and athletic facilities on the new site.
In October 1956, the beginning of construction at the Rideau River campus was celebrated with a ceremonial sod-turning by Dana Porter, then Treasurer of Ontario.
Carleton University (1957–present)
In 1957, the Carleton University Act was enacted as an amendment to the Carleton College Act, granting Carleton nominal status as a public university and resulting in its current name, Carleton University. This did not result in substantive changes to the school's governance and academic organization as it had already been granted university powers through the existing legislation.Rapid development and growth (1960–1969)
The completion of initial construction at the Rideau River campus in 1959 saw the university move to its current location at the beginning of the 1959–60 academic year. Completed at a cost of $6.5 million, the first three buildings, the Maxwell MacOdrum Library, Norman Paterson Hall and the Henry Marshall Tory Building became the centre for academic life at Carleton, with Paterson Hall and Tory Building respectively serving the arts and sciences disciplines.The 1960s saw meteoric growth in student enrolment, with the number of full-time students ballooning from 857 to 7,139 within the decade, which coincided with a sharp uptick in financial support from the provincial and federal governments towards post-secondary institutions.
An increasing share of these students came to the school from outside the National Capital Region, prompting the university to open its first purpose-built residence halls, Lanark and Renfrew Houses in the fall of 1962. The residences were initially segregated by sex, with Lanark House reserved for male students and Renfrew for female students. However, Carleton did away with the practice of mandatory sex segregation in 1969 in favour of co-educational housing, becoming the first university in North America to adopt this practice. By the end of the decade, the increased need for space to accommodate the growing faculty and student body saw the completion of several major academic buildings, including the Loeb Building in 1967 and the Mackenzie Building in 1968.
In 1967, a Catholic liberal arts college, Saint Patrick's College, became affiliated with Carleton. Saint Patrick's College was founded by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate to meet the higher educational needs of Ottawa's growing English-speaking Catholic population. Originally housed in a separate building Old Ottawa East, now the campus of Immaculata High School, a new building for the school was erected on the north end of the Carleton campus in 1973.
Steady expansion (1970–1999)
The arrival of a new decade ushered in the inauguration of the long-awaited Nideyinàn, designed to be the linchpin for student life on campus, housing a student-operated pub and other administrative services. With growing restrictions in physical space, the university hailed the completion of Dunton Tower, then referred to as the Arts Tower, in September 1972, which was the then-tallest academic building in Canada.Rising attention towards recreation and fitness, coupled with generous grants from the provincial government, spurred the construction of the Athletics Centre in 1974, housing a multiplicity of different sports facilities, including a pool, squash courts, and gymnasium.
In 1979, Saint Patrick's College was dissolved and merged into Carleton with Gerald Clarke, a professor at the school since 1954, serving as its final Dean. While Carleton is a secular institution, the name of the St. Patrick's Building was kept as a nod to Carleton's historical relationship to the Catholic institution.
Although Carleton experienced a temporary decline in student enrolment toward the latter half of the 1970s, the 1980s saw a resurgence in the number of students attending the school, representing an increase of 76%, or 5,582 students over the course of the decade, leading to overcrowding in many of the school's buildings. Responding to the demands of a larger student population during the 1980s, the university built the Life Sciences Research Centre, the Minto Centre of Advanced Studies in Engineering, and funded an extension to MacOdrum Library.
Following renovations led by Toronto-based architect Michael Lundholm, 1992 saw the opening of the Carleton University Art Gallery in the St. Patrick's Building, supported by a fundraising drive within the local community and the bequest of several pieces of Canadian art from the estate of Frances and Jack Barwick. In fall 1994, a new computing system was introduced at Carleton, extending Internet and e-mail access to all students and faculty, where this had previously been only accessible to graduate and undergraduate students in specific courses.