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24. Old English, Old Norse, Dr. Roy (and Bishop Berkeley): Fifty Years at WLU
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W–L–U: for what i would estimate to be a minuscule minority the initials still stand for Waterloo Lutheran University, even though now nearly forty years have passed since that name became history, and even though the institution remained under that name for a mere thirteen years. In 1962, the third year after Waterloo Lutheran University came into being, I enrolled at this new university as an honours English and Latin student, following Grade 13, the fifth year of Ontario’s high school system , the final examinations of which were marked anonymously in Toronto and from which students could proceed to a general B.A. (three years) or to a four-year honours degree in one of the disciplines of the time. The buildings then were few. In addition to some houses (in one of which I rented a room) there were the Arts Building,Willison Hall, and Clara Conrad Hall. Two years earlier there had appeared on the campus the first president of this new-but-not-so-new creation, William J. Villaume , who remained only six years but, in a sense, marked the whole of its existence hitherto, embodying as he did Lutheranism and its presence on the campus for almost sixty years at that point. The eventful, often conflicted years that followed epitomized to a large degree the shifting nature of a liberal arts education in a university with a name like Waterloo Lutheran in the Canada of the time and,to some extent,the final upshot of the years that followed. These musings are something of a minority report on those “Lutheran” years, with the caveat that in what Chapter 24 Old English, Old Norse, Dr. Roy (and Bishop Berkeley): Fifty Years at WLU peter c. erb 121 follows this non-Lutheran uses “Lutheran” as a broad signifier of elements I deem important in the Canadian academic tradition. It is commonplace now to ignore the thirteen years when there was a Waterloo Lutheran University or, in the case of the present centenary celebration, to judge it as a small part of the whole. But six decades— 1911–73—on Albert Street allow more than that, and the almost forty years of life on the part of Waterloo Lutheran Seminary running alongside that of Wilfrid Laurier University require that one revisit this earlier period. One year after my graduation from the honours English program, I had returned to Waterloo Lutheran University for one year, 1966–67, to teach English 10, a pre-university course that was part of an arrangement that allowed those without a regular high school degree to take four courses and then to enter the regular degree program. The year was initially designed to aid those who wished to qualify for admission to the seminary, but it had become a means for numerous students, far from the seminary program, to enter the university itself. There was no great concern about such an arrangement at the time. Only a few years prior, aspiring teachers had been able to attend one year at teachers ’ college following Grade 12 and then teach grade school, followed by two summer sessions that gained them entrance to the regular teaching workforce. In 1970, having completed my licentiate at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, I returned to the university part-time, as a philologist, teaching Latin, Old English, Old Norse, Old High German (“old” being my entrée, it seemed), upgrading my position to full-time the year following, naively thinking that two universities in the small city of Waterloo would continue, one secular and one religious. Two years later, in 1973, I left WLU to become the director of the Schwenkfelder Library in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. It was a one-year leave of absence; I didn’t know whether I would return. The leave was supported by Flora Roy (1912–2008), chair of the English department. I did return, teaching ten more years in the Department of English and thereafter in the Department of Religion and Culture for another twenty-four. Upon returning in 1974 I found an institution with a conservative Evangelical replacing the former Lutheran as president and a university named (so it seemed) with the primary intention of saving the ini122 “lutheran” to “laurier” [18.234.232.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:56 GMT) tials for its winning football team: Wilfrid Laurier University. The change that had taken place in that year away constituted more than a change in name. The new...