Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto

The Faculty of Arts and Science (A&S) is the largest academic division of the University of Toronto and its primary undergraduate faculty on the St. George campus in downtown Toronto. It is the most academically diverse division of the university, offering a large variety of programs in a broad range of subjects. With more than 31,000 undergraduate and 4,700 graduate students across seven colleges,^[3] it makes up over one third of the university's student population as a whole.

Faculty of Arts and Science

Sidney Smith Hall, the central faculty building
Type	Faculty
Established	1827; 198 years ago (1827)[1]
Parent institution	University of Toronto
Dean	Stephen Wright (interim)[2]
Academic staff	930
Undergraduates	31,000[3]
Postgraduates	4,700[3]
Location	Toronto , Ontario , Canada
Campus	St. George
Colleges	Innis New St. Michael's Trinity University Victoria Woodsworth
Website	artsci.utoronto.ca

Overview

The faculty is as old as the university itself, as a Faculty of Arts existed since the University of Toronto was established in 1827, with some of the founding colleges predating the university.^[1] Arts and Science represents over half the student population at the St. George campus; it hosts 64 per cent of its undergraduates and about one third of graduates who pursue degrees in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. It has 800 professors who teach some 2,000 courses arranged in more than 400 undergraduate and 150 graduate programs hosted by 29 departments, 49 centres and institutes, and seven colleges.^[3] In partnership with the School of Graduate Studies, the faculty hosts graduate programs offered at all three University of Toronto campuses.

College system

Every undergraduate student in the Faculty of Arts and Science belongs to one of the affiliated colleges. These include the constituent colleges (Innis, New, University, and Woodsworth) and federated colleges (St. Michael's, Trinity, and Victoria).^[4]

Rankings

The Department of Economics has been previously ranked as one of the top 25 worldwide economics faculty rankings, placing 23rd and 18th during the years (1995–99)^[5] and (2004–08)^[6] respectively. The Department of Philosophy ranked 15th overall in the English-speaking world and 1st in Canada in the Philosophical Gourmet Report.^[7] The Department of Sociology ranks among the top 10 in North America. In the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities, the Department of Computer Science placed first overall in Canada, and ranked 10th worldwide.^[8]

Admission statistics

For the 2012–2013 entrance year, Arts had an entry average of 86.6% and Science had an entry average of 88.8%. Rotman Commerce, a joint program with the Rotman School of Management, had an entry average of 91.7%.^[9][10] For professional and graduate studies, admission is competitive. For 2011–2012, programs such as public policy and global affairs accept about one-tenth of applicants, though they do not have standardized admissions test requirements. Doctoral-stream master's programs had an acceptance rate of 29.6%, while doctoral programs admitted 21.5% of applicants.^[11]

Academic units

The faculty consists of 29 academic departments, 7 colleges, and 45 interdisciplinary centres, institutes and programs.^[12] Below is a list of departments in the faculty:

• Department of Anthropology
• David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Department of Art History
• Department of Cell and Systems Biology
• Department of Chemistry
• Department of Classics
• Department of Computer Science
• Department of Earth Sciences
• Department of East Asian Studies
• Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Department of Economics
• Department of English
• Department of French
• Department of Geography & Planning
• Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures
• Department of History
• Department of Italian Studies
• Department of Linguistics
• Department of Mathematics
• Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
• Department of Philosophy
• Department of Physics
• Department of Political Science
• Department of Psychology
• Department for the Study of Religion
• Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
• Department of Sociology
• Department of Spanish & Portuguese
• Department of Statistical Sciences

Notable associated centres and institutions include:

• School of Cities
• School of the Environment
• Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Notable people

Alumni

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Toronto alumni.

• Lester B. Pearson (B.A., Victoria College) – Canadian Prime Minister and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.
• John Charles Fields (B.A.) – mathematician and the founder of the prestigious Fields Medal.
• Margaret Atwood (B.A., Victoria College) – novelist, poet, literary critic and inventor, author of The Handmaid's Tale.
• Paul Martin (B.A., St. Michael's College) – lawyer and retired politician who served as the 21st prime minister of Canada.
• Harold Innis – professor of political economy, helped develop the staples thesis and the Toronto School of communication theory.
• Edward S. "Ted" Rogers Jr. (B.A., Trinity College) – businessman and philanthropist, founder of Rogers Communications.
• Ilya Sutskever (B.Sc., M.Sc., PhD) – computer scientist; co-inventor of AlexNet and OpenAI; former chief scientist at OpenAI.^[13]
• Andrej Karpathy (B.Sc.) – computer scientist; former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla; co-foundeder of OpenAI.^[14]
• William Reeves (Ph.D.) – animator and technical director; one of the founding employees of Pixar.^[15]

Faculty

For a more comprehensive list, see List of University of Toronto faculty.

• Stephen Cook – University Professor Emeritus (Computer Science), recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for formalizing the notion of NP-completeness through Cook's theorem, considered one of the forefathers of computational complexity theory.^[16]
• Geoffrey Hinton – University Professor Emeritus (Computer Science), "Godfather of AI," Nobel Prize laureate, former researcher at Google, co-founder of the Vector Institute.^[17]
• Raquel Urtasun – University Professor (Computer Science) and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning, co-founder of the Vector Institute.
• Sanja Fidler – Associate Professor (Computer Science), Director of AI at Nvidia, co-founder of the Vector Institute.
• Allan Borodin – University Professor (Computer Science) and former department chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1980 to 1985.
• Charles Rackoff – University Professor Emeritus (Computer Science) specializing in cryptography and security protocols.

See also

• St. George campus