Notre histoire

Ten kilometres of hallways, 2496 doors, 6514 metal windows, 14 elevators, 7 main staircases, 4,800,000 bricks for a building 280 metres long and 52 metres high. Fifteen years after work had begun, the University’s new home was finally inaugurated. For the occasion, 33 honorary PhDs were awarded, including one to the campus’ architect, Ernest Cormier. Before the hundreds of guests in attendance, the Chancellor, Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau, said: “In 1643, Monsieur de Maisonneuve planted the cross on Montréal’s mountain. Three hundred years later, we are inaugurating, on the same Mount Royal, the halls of knowledge.”

It was the University’s best guarded secret during World War II. From 1943 to 1945, the west wing of the main building was home to a laboratory where Allied scientists perfected a heavy water nuclear reactor. Undertaken as part of the Manhattan Project, which was the origin of the first atomic bomb, research at the Université de Montréal led to production of the first working atomic battery outside of the United States. Pierre Demers, one of the few French Canadian researchers on the team, also discovered a new series of radioactive elements from Neptunium.

First Lionel Groulx founded the French America History Institute; next he orchestrated the creation of a history institute at the Université de Montréal. The former became a veritable intellectual hub for historical research and began publishing the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, which quickly became the primary journal for publishing research on the history of French Canada. In 1962, the history institute became the Université de Montréal’s Department of History and the cradle of what came to be called the Montréal School, which formed around Guy Frégault, Michel Brunet and Maurice Séguin.

In 1920, the Université de Montréal’s first fundraising campaign celebrated the University’s independence. The 1947 campaign marked the end of financial insecurity. The University appealed to the generosity of donors to handle the increase in new students, some of whom were returning from serving in World War II. The initiative exceeded all hopes: nearly $2 million dollars more than the goal was raised! The money was used to build a medical and research centre, create a pension fund for employees, build a student centre and complete construction of the main building.

Created in 1886 and affiliated with UdeM since 1895, the comparative medicine and veterinary science school became the Province of Québec’s veterinary medicine school and moved to Saint-Hyacinthe where it set up a dairy farming school and a centre for artificial insemination. In 1969, it became a faculty, and three years later it founded an animal breeding research centre, which was recognized by the Ministère de l’Éducation as a multidisciplinary, inter-university centre. It is the only school of its kind in Québec, and belongs to the select club of Canada’s four faculties of veterinary medicine.

Dr. Gustave Gingras, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, established the Montréal rehabilitation institute, which played a decisive role in treating victims of polio and thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s. Dedicated to supporting people with handicaps, the Institute perfected new prostheses and rehabilitation methods that were adopted around the world. Affiliated with the UdeM, the institute works with the Faculty of Medicine’s rehabilitation school, which was also founded by Dr. Gingras in 1954. Research oriented, the school awarded its first PhD in 1993.

Founded on October 18, 1950 in order to “train church musicians,” the Faculty of Music was originally divided into two sections, one consecrated to religious and the other to secular music. At the time only organ and piano were taught. Over the years, the Faculty expanded and considerably modernized its range of programs to include performance, composition, musicology, popular music, jazz and notation. Since the 1990s, the Université de Montréal Orchestra, the Nouvel ensemble moderne and the UMMUS label have brought renown to the Faculty.

One year before her coronation, Princess Elisabeth visited UdeM. It was a huge event. The perimeter around the University’s streets was closed and students joined the crowd to applaud Her Royal Highness, who was accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh. Over the years, many other famous politicians, artists and scientists have signed UdeM’s visitor’s book, including Marguerite Yourcenar, André Malraux, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Charles de Gaulle two days before he made his famous “Vive le Québec libre!” speech from the balcony of Montréal’s City Hall.

UdeM created a continuing education section for adults. It opened courses in certain faculties to the public and originally targeted those who had not been able to go to a classical college. However, in the 1960s, continuing education emerged as the primary means for working graduates to update their knowledge and remain on the cutting edge. In 1968, the section became the Service de l’éducation permanente. It acquired the status of faculty in 1974, thereby consecrating the integration of adult education into the University’s structures.

Dr. Paul David, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, founded the Montréal Heart Institute (MHI). Affiliated with UdeM, the Institute was the first of its kind in Canada and became the country’s leader in cardiology research. In particular, the first operation using an artificial heart-lung machine was performed there in 1958, and the first heart transplant in Canada’s medical history in 1968. Its team also made a breakthrough in 1982 by perfecting a new technique for dilating coronary arteries. The MHI still attracts many researchers and Faculty of Medicine residents specialising in cardiology.

In 1956 The Stress of Life was published, making its author, Dr. Hans Selye, famous. Of Austrian origin, Dr. Selye had been Professor of Histology at the Université de Montréal since 1945, and founded the Medicine and Experimental Surgery Institute. In his first book, he introduced a new diagnostic concept to research in endocrinology: the adaptation syndrome, in other words, the set of changes that enable an organism to deal with the physiopathological consequences of natural and other trauma. Stress had entered into the list of pathologies of the modern world… and into the French language.

In January 1956, there was an inauguration on campus for the building now known as Residence A. Designed to house students, it has six floors, a total of 115 rooms and a living room for residents at the end of each floor. The rule was that “ladies are admitted from 8:00 to 11:00 on Friday evening, and on Sunday from 3:00 pm to 11:00 pm.” In 1972, the campus opened a second residence, which was reserved for women and nicknamed the “tower of virgins.” Today there are 1122 rooms in residence that are home to around 1200 students, both male and female, each year.

The École polytechnique was feeling increasingly cramped in the building on Saint-Denis Street, and was no longer able to keep up with the unrestrained growth of its student population. In 1956, the government authorized it to sign an agreement with the Université de Montréal to move to the campus. Two years later, the new École polytechnique building was inaugurated uphill from the main pavilion. When classes began that year, there were 2000 full-time students, including four women: 25% more than in 1956 and twice as many as in 1950.

UdeM’s oldest research centre, the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), was founded in 1961 on the initiative of Paul Gérin-Lajoie. Originally, it was composed of four researchers: Jacques Brossard, Luce Patenaude, Jean Beetz and the future Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Its mandate was to foster research in an area relatively unexplored by French speakers: constitutional and administrative law. Over the years, the CRDP has grown to become the largest legal research centre in Canada. Its leadership in information and cyberspace law is now recognized around the world.

Maurice L’Abbé, Director of the Department of Mathematics, founded a higher mathematics seminar, which brings together mathematicians from around the world and is a veritable springboard for research in mathematics in Québec. The same year, the University began investing in computers, and mandated Jacques St-Pierre to set up a research computing centre so that members of the scientific community could process digital information. Jacques St-Pierre was the architect of the campus’ computerization, and he also created the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research and the Centre for Research in Mathematics.

The old adage applies to researchers, but also to institutions. In 1962, the University founded a publishing house, the Presses Universitaires de Montréal (PUM), to showcase its professors’ work through books and journals. Among other achievements, the PUM undertook the most ambitious publishing project in Québec: the Bibliothèque du Nouveau Monde Collection. It is a critical edition of the major texts in French Canadian literature, from Jacques Cartier’s reports to Jacques Ferron’s stories. Forty years later, PUM has in its catalogue some 800 titles and one best seller: L’homme rapaillé by the poet Gaston Miron.

Cafeteria and residence employees established the Syndicat national des employés de l’Université de Montréal (SNEUM). Affiliated with the CSN, it was the first certified union at the Université de Montréal. In 1966, maintenance employees formed their own union, Local 1186, followed in 1970 by office employees, who created the Syndicat des employés de l’UdeM, Local 1244 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). The SNEUM joined CUPE in 1986 and now has some 2000 members. In 2003, Local 1244 went on strike for several weeks over working conditions and pay equity.

Since 1943, University students, professors and employees had been hiking up each and every one of the 142 steps leading to the campus on the mountain. In April, the University put an end to the daily torture and inaugurated moving sidewalks so that everyone could get to the University without getting tired. The sidewalks can carry 16,000 people an hour, and made obsolete what had been until then considered the longest wooden staircase ever built in Montréal.