Acronym for Université du Québec à Montréal.
UQAM was founded on April 9th, 1969, by the merging of École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (Montréal's fine-art school), Collège Sainte-Marie and three other regular schools.
Primarily based on arts and humanities, UQAM also started to dispence management class in the middle of the 70's. At the beginning of the 80's, UQAM started to develop science faculty. Although these two domains are still really small, they tend to be the ones that the administration put more emphasis on (probably because they are more lucrative).
Ranked as the last (or not far, anyways) university in Canada by the prestigious neo-liberal MacLean's magazine, UQAM remains a strong reference for Québec's intelligentsia. Often refered to as "l'université du peuple" (the people's university), UQAM has produce some of the better known intellectual of the province.