The University of King's College, founded in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1789, is the oldest English-speaking university in the Commonwealth located outside the UK. This, however, was not the first King's College in the North American colonies; King George II had founded one in New York in 1756, but its identity as such was short-lived and after the American Revolution it was reorganised and renamed Columbia University.
The King's College with which we are concerned was founded by Anglican United Empire Loyalists who migrated to British North America, specifically Nova Scotia, after the American Revolution forced them into exile. It was formally recognised as an institution in 1802, when it received from King George III its Royal Charter; it remained in Windsor until it burnt to the ground in 1920.
Naturally, the destruction of the buildings in which it was housed caused some uncertainty as to the survival of King's College; a grant from the Carnegie Foundation assuaged these doubts, and the university was rebuilt in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, where it entered into close association with Halifax's Dalhousie University.
The Second World War had a profound impact on university life. The college became known as "HMCS King's", and was the location for the training of officers in the Royal Canadian Navy from 1941 to 1945. Academic programmes were continued off-campus, with the help of the faculty and grounds at Dalhousie and the makeshift lecture hall provided by the local United Church.
After the war, classes were moved back onto the campus at King's College and continued on as normal until 1971, when the divinity programme at the college was relocated to the Atlantic School of Theology, also located in Halifax. More radical change was seen in 1972, with the implementation of the unique Foundation Year Programme, and again in 1978 with the establishment of a fully-fledged degree-granting School of Journalism - the only one in Atlantic Canada.
In the years since, the college has not by any means remained stagnant. The 1990s saw the development and implementation of three new programmes of study: the Contemporary Studies Programme in 1993, Early Modern Studies in 1999, and History of Science and Technology in 2000.
In close affiliation with Dalhousie, King's functions as a "university within a university"; where Dalhousie's undergraduate enrolment is well over 11,000, King's maintains a total student population of around 900. This inordinately small size allows it to have an atmosphere which is considerably more personal than that of larger universities; it prides itself on "individual attention and a sense of community".
Academic programmes at King's consist of the unique Foundation Year Programme - an amalgamation of subject matter spanning all of the humanities and presented in a holistic manner which focuses on the relationship between the areas addressed, for first-year students; a comprehensive Journalism programme; a Combined Honours programme which focuses on social and economic change in the context of politics, science, and culture in Europe and North America both in history and in the modern-day, as well as other arts and sciences programmes offered at Dalhousie University.
http://www.ukings.ns.ca | 
