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 enrolls 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 of whom 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. The Carleton Ravens men's basketball team has won 18 W. P. McGee Trophy national championships in the sport.

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 $197 in 2025 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.

Organization and administration

Governance

The university's governing framework is established through the Carleton University Act, 1952, enabling legislation which sets out the basic legal obligations and purposes of the institution. The Act establishes Carleton as a bicameral institution, governed by a Board of Governors and Senate. The Act establishes the objects and purpose of the university as the advancement of learning; the dissemination of knowledge; the intellectual, social, and moral development of its members and the community at large; and the establishment of a non-sectarian institution within the City of Ottawa.

Board of Governors

The Board of Governors oversees the corporate affairs of the institution, including finances, real property, risk management, and strategic direction. The Board is also responsible for appointing the President and Chancellor, and determines the compensation of staff, faculty, and members of the senior administration. The Board of Governors is composed of 36 members, with 18 members derived from the students, staff, and administration of Carleton. These include four students, two faculty members, two members of the University Senate, two alumni, two staff, as well as the President and Chancellor, who are ex-officio members of the Board. The remainder of the representatives are selected from the local community at large.

To support its mandate and oversight function, the Board has six standing committees, with each Governor holding membership in one or two of these committees over the course of a year. These standing committees include Executive, Audit & Risk, Building Program, Advancement and University Relations, Governance, and Finance.

The Board is led by the board chair, who presides over meetings, evaluates executive performance, advises senior administration, and represents the university's interests to government. The current board chair is Beth Creary, former Senior Vice-President, Legal & Compliance at Ligado Networks.

Senate

The Senate comprises 86 members, including 40 faculty members, two contract instructors, 10 undergraduate students, three graduate students, 23 ex-officio members, four members of the Board of Governors, and up to four special appointments.

Finances

For the 2023-24 academic year, Carleton reported a proposed budget of $525 million.

The largest annual sources of revenue for Carleton are tuition fees, which generate 50% of the university's income, representing $336 million in earnings, and provincial government funding, representing 26% of the university's income, or $174 million.

Academics

Carleton is a mid-sized comprehensive and research-intensive public university, and is part of several pan-institutional bodies, including Universities Canada and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. As of the 2020–21 academic year, Carleton received 23,544 applications, producing a first-year cohort of 6,227 In 2023, the school reported an enrolment of 30,760 students, comprising 25722 undergraduate and 5,038 graduate students, supported by 1062 faculty members and 861 contract instructors. Carleton's graduation rate within seven years is approximately 70.4% as of the 2017–18 academic year, with a graduate employment rate of 92.7% within two years of graduation. Among Carleton graduates, 87.7% are employed in a field related to their degrees.

Arts and Social Sciences

The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) offers 27 majors and 16 minors leading to the Bachelor of Arts (BA), Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Bachelor of Arts (Combined Honours), Bachelor of Cognitive Science (B.Cog.Sci.), Bachelor of Global and International Studies (B.GINS) degrees, and Bachelor of Humanities (B.Hum.) degrees. The faculty oversees a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social science fields, including African studies, anthropology, English, French, geography, history, music, psychology, and sociology.

The Faculty also houses the College of the Humanities, one of Canada's few Great Books programs, which leads to a B.Hum (Bachelor of Humanities) degree, and Carleton's Institute of Cognitive Science, which offers the only fully structured PhD program in Cognitive Science in the country, as well as undergraduate and masters programs. There is also a collaborative M.A. in Digital humanities, one of the first in Canada. The Public History Program is known nationally for its innovative teaching and research, having recently won national prizes. FASS offers, in total, 14 master's and nine doctoral programs.

Engineering and Design

The Faculty of Engineering and Design is among the oldest within the university, with the first engineering courses offered in 1945, and four-year engineering degrees being offered by the school beginning in 1956. The Faculty of Engineering and Design has since developed a broad range of coursework in the fields of engineering, architecture, industrial design, and information technology housing 20 distinct undergraduate programs under the Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Bachelor of Architectural Studies (BAS), Bachelor of Industrial Design (BID), Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT), and Bachelor of Media Production and Design (BMPD), along with 37 graduate programs at the master's and PhD level. As of the fall 2019 semester, more than 5,800 undergraduate and 1,200 graduate students are enrolled in the Faculty.

Campus

Carleton's campus is situated on 153 acres (62 ha) bounded to the west by Colonel By Drive and the Rideau Canal, to the east by Bronson Avenue, and the south by the Rideau River. The campus is situated adjacent to the Dominion Arboretum and the Central Experimental Farm.

During its initial construction in 1959, the campus consisted of three buildings, the MacOdrum Library, the Tory Building, and Paterson Hall, forming a quadrangle situated at the heart of the university's academic buildings. Since then, the university has expanded to forty-nine buildings, the newest addition being Rideau House, which was inaugurated in 2025.

The campus is accessible to road traffic through two entrances respectively located at Bronson Avenue and Colonel By Drive. Carleton's campus contains a series of surface roads to facilitate traffic in and out of the university, the most heavily used of them being Campus Avenue, which was converted to a single-direction road in 2019 to ease congestion.

Several OC Transpo bus routes, including the 7, 10, 48, and 111, serve the campus directly, in addition to the O-Train's Carleton station, located at the centre of campus.

The campus is bisected by O-Train Line 2, with several pedestrian and vehicular bridges and tunnels facilitating access between either side. The majority of the university's academic and residential buildings are situated on the western side of campus, while the eastern side contains the university's athletics facilities and administrative offices.

Architecture

The prevalence of modernist and brutalist architecture in the design of the earliest academic buildings on the Carleton campus represented a stylistic departure from traditional collegiate architecture in North America, which historically emulated the Gothic style dominant in many European universities. The decision to incorporate modernism into the campus' design was intentional, presenting Carleton as an egalitarian, progressive, and forward-thinking institution.

Architectural critics have looked to Carleton as a leading example of modernist collegiate architecture in Canada. The campus became the subject of Modern U, an exhibition by local artist Adrian Gröllner that sought to highlight the late modernist architecture embodied by many of Carleton's early buildings.

Tunnel system

Buildings on campus, with a few exceptions, are connected by a five kilometre-long system of underground pedestrian tunnels. The Carleton University tunnel system is the most extensive network of tunnels at a Canadian university or college campus. The tunnels were initially built as part of the second phase of initial construction on campus in the 1960s. Originally conceived as a maintenance crawl space connecting heating and ventilation between campus buildings, a suggestion by a staff member transformed them into accessible pedestrian tunnels for students and faculty to use when travelling between different buildings on campus. The tunnels receive heightened usage during the winter months due to the severity of winters in Ottawa. Maintenance staff use modified golf carts in the tunnels to transport personnel, supplies, and mail to different locations on campus.

Library and collections

MacOdrum Library

One of the three original buildings on the Carleton campus, the MacOdrum Library serves as Carleton's central library and archives. The library is named for former Carleton President and Vice-Chancellor Murdoch Maxwell MacOdrum. As of 2022, the Library maintains a collection of approximately 1.2 million print monographs, 2.7 million e-books, and over 260,000 e-journals. During final exam periods, the library extends its operating hours to twenty-four hours to accommodate students preparing for their examinations or completing assignments. On an annual basis, the library receives upwards of 1.6 million visits from students, faculty, and researchers.

In 2013, the library inaugurated the Discovery Centre for Undergraduate Research, a multi-purpose space containing meeting tables, multimedia collaborative spaces, video game laboratories, as well as 3D printers. In 2023, the fourth floor of the MacOdrum Library, including the Discovery Centre, was transformed into a newly designed space called the Future Learning Lab, which includes spaces for studying, events and workshops, along with an XR (mixed-reality) equipped space.

The library regularly hosts exhibitions on the second floor, covering a broad spectrum of topics and academic disciplines. The second floor is also home to the Book Arts Lab, an experiential and multidisciplinary learning space dedicated to hands-on learning about typesetting, letterpress printing, bookbinding, decorative paper techniques and illustrations, such as wood cuts.

Archives and Special Collections

The MacOdrum Library maintains extensive archives and research collections of documents, artifacts, and other materials related to specific academic disciplines, as well as the personal effects of various persons of historical significance. Notable collections include the W. McAllister Johnson Collection, containing artwork and other documents pertaining to French art history in the 17th and 18th centuries, The Uganda Collection, which houses newspaper clippings, documents, and artifacts related to the expulsion of Uganda's South Asian minority under the rule of Idi Amin, as well as Carleton University heritage material, including yearbooks, student newspapers, photographs, and ephemera significant to the history of the university itself.

Эх сурвалж: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)