McGill University - University Identity and Culture

University Identity and Culture

The McGill coat of arms is derived from an armorial device assumed during his lifetime by the founder of the University, James McGill. The University's patent of arms was granted by England's Garter-King-at-Arms in 1922 and registered in 1956 with Lord Lyon King of Arms in Edinburgh and in 1992 with the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada. In heraldic terms, the coat of arms is described as follows: "Argent three Martlets Gules, on a chief dancette of the second, an open book proper garnished or bearing the legend In Domino Confido in letters Sable between two crowns of the first. Motto: Grandescunt Aucta Labore." The coat of arms consists of two parts, the shield and the scroll. The University publishes a guide to the use of the University's arms and motto.

The university's symbol is the martlet, stemming from the presence of the mythical bird on the official arms of the university. The school's official colours are red and white. McGill's motto is Grandescunt Aucta Labore, Latin for "By work, all things increase and grow" (literally, "Things grown great increase by work," that is, things that grow to be great do so by means of work).

The official school song is entitled "Hail, Alma Mater."

Read more about this topic:  McGill University

Famous quotes containing the words university, identity and/or culture:

    The university is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe. It is big, complex, demanding, competitive, bureaucratic, and chronically short of money.
    Phyllis Dain (b. 1930)

    Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
    It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.
    Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)

    We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.
    Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)