University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university with three campuses in the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, Canada. Based on the grounds that surround Queen's Park in Toronto, it was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada. Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.
Its three campuses are known as St. George, Mississauga, and Scarborough. Its large downtown Toronto campus, St. George, is the oldest of the three and operates as a collegiate university, comprising 11 [|colleges], each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. Its suburban campuses in the Toronto district of Scarborough to the east and city of Mississauga to the west were established in the 1960s, and together make up nearly half of the university's undergraduate student body.
The University of Toronto is the largest post-secondary institution in Canada, with more than 100,000 students across its campuses and colleges. It offers over 700 undergraduate and 200 graduate programs. The university receives the most annual scientific research funding and endowment of any Canadian university. It is also one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, alongside McGill University in Montreal. Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for influential movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.
The university was the birthplace of insulin, stem cell research, the first artificial cardiac pacemaker, and the site of the first successful lung transplant and nerve transplant. The university was also home to the first electron microscope, the development of deep learning, neural network, multi-touch technology, the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness. The University of Toronto is the recipient of both the single largest philanthropic gift in Canadian history, a $250 million donation from James and Louise Temerty in 2020, and the largest ever research grant in Canada, a $200 million grant from the Government of Canada in 2023.
The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, primarily within U Sports, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto's University College in November 1861. The university's Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.
, 13 Nobel laureates, 6 Turing Award winners, 100 Rhodes Scholars, and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university. University of Toronto alumni additionally include five prime ministers of Canada, three governors general of Canada, nine foreign leaders, seventeen justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, and eight mayors of Toronto.
History
Early history
The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an Oxford-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming "from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University... for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature... to continue for ever, to be called King's College." The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential future first Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college's first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen's Park.
Under Strachan's stewardship, King's College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy's control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King's College as the University of Toronto and severed the school's ties with the church, given that York was renamed Toronto upon the city's incorporation in 1834. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War, the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps, which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia led by professor Henry Croft.
Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Temerty Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843, medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile, the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.
A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library, but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades, a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges, including Strachan's Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. 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 dean, was Canada's first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.
World wars and post-war years
The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended, although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935, followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. By the 1961–62 academic year, the university had a total enrolment of 14,302 students, including 1,531 graduate students.The university opened its second campus, then known as Scarborough College in 1964, and third campus, then known as Erindale College shortly after in 1967. The university's former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph in 1964 and York University in 1965, respectively. Beginning in the 1980s, reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.
Since 2000
In 2000, geophysicist Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university, after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017, a human rights application was filed against the university by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018, the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation, after a complaint was filed by one of its students. An antisemitism working group reported that antisemitism on campus was a systemic source of discrimination, harassment and violence. The 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment denied Jewish faculty and students entry to university buildings at Kings College Circle and sparked public outrage. Legal proceedings led the Ontario Superior Court to order the removal of the encampment, citing hate speech and harassment.The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than one billion dollars in 2007. From 2011 to 2018, the university embarked on the Boundless fundraising campaign, which concluded in 2018 at billion raised, setting a new all-time fundraising record in Canada.
On September 24, 2020, the university announced the single largest donation in Canadian history, a million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from Toronto-based philanthropists James and Louise Temerty. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Onex CEO Gerry Schwartz and his wife, Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a innovation and artificial intelligence centre known as the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. The Faculty of Medicine has been renamed the Temerty Faculty of Medicine in their honour.
In December 2021, the University of Toronto announced the launch of the Defy Gravity campaign, the largest fundraising campaign in Canadian history, with a goal of raising billion for the university.
In August 2025, the university announced the launch of the Lawson Climate Institute, aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research and policy development on climate change. The institute’s stated mission is to connect scholars, policymakers, and community leaders to advance solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to impacts of climate change. Initial funding for the Climate Institute was provided through university resources, with plans to seek additional support from public and private partners.