Toronto's university was conceived as a bulwark against American republican ideas
John Graves Simcoe, an Oxford-educated officer who had fought against the American revolutionaries, wanted a college in Upper Canada to stop republicanism seeping north. His wish became King's College, chartered in 1827 under Anglican control. Two decades later reformers stripped the church's grip away and renamed it the University of Toronto.
Simcoe, first lieutenant-governor and founder of the colonial capital York, never saw it built, though an executive committee recommended a college in 1798. King George IV issued the charter on 15 March 1827 after heavy lobbying by John Strachan, later Toronto's first Anglican bishop, who became its first president. The college was tied closely to the Church of England and the colonial elite known as the Family Compact, which made it a target for reformers.
In 1849 the newly responsible provincial government voted to rename it after the city, which had dropped the name York on incorporation in 1834, and cut its religious ties. Strachan, anticipating defeat, had resigned the previous year in fury and opened Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary; decades later, in 1904, Trinity itself joined the university's federation of colleges. A nondenominational University College became the teaching core. During the American Civil War students formed a rifle corps, which fought against the Fenian raiders on the Niagara border in 1866.
The university admitted women from 1884. A fire in 1890 gutted University College and destroyed 33,000 library books, which were restored within two years. It launched Canada's first academic press in 1901 and first forestry faculty in 1907. By 1961 to 1962 it had 14,302 students; new campuses followed in Scarborough in 1964 and Mississauga in 1967. Today it enrols over 100,000.
Its laboratories produced insulin, the first artificial cardiac pacemaker, early stem cell research and pioneering work in deep learning and neural networks, and astronomers there identified Cygnus X-1, the first known black hole. In 2020 James and Louise Temerty gave CA$250 million to its medical faculty, the largest single gift in Canadian history. Alumni include prime ministers Mackenzie King and Lester Pearson.
Source: University of Toronto
