 Named President and Chancellor of McGill University in early 1914, Macdonald also provided funding to create McGill University College of British Columbia which ultimately became the University of British Columbia.Macdonald died in 1917 and was interred in the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal.A proponent of bilingualism, his will established travelling fellowships for the McGill University Faculty of Law that paid the costs for English-speaking Quebec lawyers to study the French language and the history of the French Civil Code in France.