Dawson College - History

History

Dawson College was first based at the Royal Canadian Air Force Base, St. Jean (now Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), Quebec, in the Montérégie (later the location of Le Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean). It was a satellite campus set up on September 26, 1945 by McGill University to handle the overflow registration of students after the Second World War and the returning veterans. Those students in the first 3 years of the Faculty of Engineering were taught there, thus relieving the McGill campus for the later 2 years for the degree course. That version of Dawson College was closed in May 1950.

The college traces its origins to the merger of several institutions which became public in 1967, when the Quebec system of CEGEPs was created. The current Dawson College was the first English-language institution in the Quebec network of CEGEPs when it opened its doors to 1,200 students in the fall of 1969. The College is named for Sir William Dawson, a principal of McGill University from 1855 to 1893.

The College was originally housed in a converted pharmaceutical factory at 350 Selby Street in Westmount. In 1970, a second campus (used mostly for Creative Arts programs) was opened on Viger Street just to the north of Old Montreal. Two years later, its third campus was opened near Parc Lafontaine. By 1988 Dawson either still or had also operated the Richelieu campus in St. Henri, the DeLorimier campus, the Victoria campus on McGill Street (in Old Montreal), with additional facilities on Saint Catherine Street among other locations.

In 1988, Dawson College occupied the former Mother House of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. Full consolidation under one roof only happened in 1997, when the Selby building was finally closed. Extensive renovations transformed the century-old building into an attractive, modern, and well-equipped college, occupying an entire city block between de Maisonneuve Boulevard and Sherbrooke Street and Wood Avenue in Westmount and Atwater Street in Montreal.

In August 2010, Dawson College added some classrooms on the fourth floor of the Pepsi Forum as a solution to overcrowding. The P Wing was therefore equipped with six classrooms for regular day students and one classroom and computer laboratory for programs leading to the obtention of an AEC (Attestation of Collegial Studies).