How Canada’s first psychology department arose at McGill University.

Abstract

Canada's first official department of psychology came into existence at Montréal's McGill University in 1924. First chartered more than a century before, in 1821, McGill started teaching courses in "psychology" as early as 1871. Although McGill contributed two very early members to the American Psychological Association-John C. Murray and T. Wesley Mills-it was not until 1910 that it housed an experimental psychology laboratory, in the Department of Philosophy, opened by William D. Tait. Tait and two philosophers, William Caldwell and J. W. A. Hickson, worked contentiously side-by-side until the administration agreed, in 1924, to an autonomous Department of Psychology under Tait's leadership. Although the University of Toronto had founded a psychology laboratory two decades earlier than McGill had, the Montréal school founded a Department of Psychology, the first in Canada, more than two years before Toronto did. This article investigates the dynamicsintellectual, political, and personalthat led McGill to establish the first psychology department, as well as its early development, prior to the arrival of Donald Hebb. As is often the case with institutional change, the decision to separate psychology from philosophy was driven as much by the administration's desire to resolve long-standing fractious personal relations among the faculty as it was by any intellectual or disciplinary issues. Public Significance StatementThis article explores the establishment of the first Department of Psychology in Canada, at McGill University. It is a story of local interpersonal conflicts that produced an official break between the older discipline of philosophy and the rising discipline of psychology.