medical school vs faculty of medicine

The word faculty in English can be used for an institution of higher education that is smaller than a university and bigger than a department. A faculty, in this sense, is a part of a university, and normally comprises several departments. There can thus be, at a particular university, the faculty of medicine, the faculty of law, the faculty of engineering, the faculty of the humanities, and so forth. Hearing this use of the word may leave an impression that it is, in the context of education, the equivalent of similarly-sounding words in other languages, such as Fakultät in German, and faculté in French. If one's primary language is not English, and one is used to referring to such educational institutions by a similar word in one's primary language, one will naturally have a tendency to use the word faculty for them when speaking English. That tendency will be reinforced by consulting a dictionary, which will reassure one that this is indeed a correct way to use the word.

There are, however, a couple of subtleties about the use of this word, that may not be obvious from a typical dictionary entry for it. First, in the U.S., the word stands for those who teach at a particular school, considered collectively. While standard dictionaries duly note that the word has this sense in the U.S., they often fail to make it clear that this sense dominates the U.S. usage so completely, that using it in the sense outlined in the first paragraph would not be understood by an average native speaker of American English. Probably the only people in the U.S. who would understand it are those who have had some experience interacting with foreign educational systems.

Second, even though the phrases such as the faculty of medicine are readily understood in the English-speaking countries other than the U.S., their register is more formal than of the corresponding phrases in, say, French. Somebody studying medicine at the University of Toronto may write that he is enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine when filling out some bureaucratic form, or on his resume, but is unlikely use such a phrase in casual conversation. If he happens to run into a friend while walking to his classes, he probably won't use the word faculty in telling the friend where he is going. His counterpart in France, on the other hand, would, in such a situation, quite naturally say that he is going to his 'fac'. (The fact that this abbreviated version of faculté exists is itself revealing of how much the word is a part of everyday French vocabulary; nothing like that can be found in English.) A tendency to overuse the word faculty in this sense is thus likely to identify one as a foreigner, even if one's English is fluent and formally impeccable.