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The Canadian Historical Review 85.1 (2004) 164-165



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Setting the Agenda; Jean Royce and the Shaping of Queen's University. Roberta Hamilton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002. Pp. viii, 356, illus. $45.00

Jean Royce (1904-1987) was registrar of Queen's University for thirty-five years. In the words of distinguished Queen's scientist Dr Allie Vibert Douglas, 'Jean was a remarkable woman ... able, gifted and large of heart and mind.' In the eyes of many students and graduates, Royce was Queen's. She had admitted them, advised them, encouraged them to live up to their potential, and rejoiced in their successes. She was a crucial member of the administration: better than anyone else, she knew the course requirements and regulations for all units of the university; and she was secretary to innumerable important committees where, in the informal old days, she systematized procedures by introducing such obvious improvements as agendas for meetings. She was active in campus organizations and was generally liked by both members of faculty and non-academics. Her office was chronically understaffed and overburdened, but she was devoted to the university and never let it down. She had no intention of leaving.

Why, then, did Principal James Corry come to her office one day in February 1968 to tell her abruptly that he had already appointed a male friend as her successor and she should be prepared to retire?

That was the question that plagued Royce for the rest of her life. 'What did I do wrong?' she asked herself. Hardly anyone else knew or even suspected that the registrar had been dismissed by her beloved university. Her secret anguish was well disguised by the fact that Queen's bestowed upon her an lld degree at the next convocation. On that occasion, when luminaries such as Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Unesco's René Dubois were also honoured, the only person to receive a standing ovation was Jean Royce.

In Setting the Agenda, Roberta Hamilton has carefully researched Royce's life and work and has dealt insightfully with her tormenting question. This book is both a sympathetic biography and an examination of university governance in a period of significant social change - the years of the post-Second World War enrolment influx, the student revolutions of the 1960s, the growth of feminism during the 1970s and [End Page 164] the democratization of the university in the 1980s. It begins appropriately with Royce's family background.

Royce was born in St Thomas, Ontario, into what she herself called 'an arid working-class household.' She was an unlikely candidate for becoming a personage in a university, especially when her high school grades (earned before she was fitted with glasses) did not win her a scholarship, so she had to work her way through college. Fortunately, one of her summer jobs in the Queen's library led to an invitation to become assistant to Alice King, the university registrar. When Miss King died in 1933, Jean Royce, then twenty-nine years old, succeeded her - although she was told quite plainly that 'it is the policy of the trustees to appoint to the Office of Registrar a male.'

Hamilton points out that while becoming registrar was a coup for Royce, it 'was less a break from patriarchal practice than an indication of the registrar's low status.' Be that as it may, over the years Royce turned the position into one of power, authority, and respect. In chapter 4, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Royce,' Hamilton scrutinizes the social forces and unmasks the academic skullduggery that eventually led to Cory's brusque ultimatum. This chapter is at the heart of the book and, for this reader, the most interesting.

The two chapters that follow, drawn largely from a cornucopia of personal reminiscences of colleagues, friends, and former students and from Royce's letters to her well-known sister, Marion, are less analytical. They cover Royce's attempted suicide, her later work with the Ban Righ Foundation, her election to the Board of...

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