Leadership and Purpose: A History of Wilfrid Laurier University tells the story of the creation and growth of one of Canada’s leading universities.
On October 30, 1911, a jubilant crowd of nearly 1,500 people gathered in their Sunday finest on the lawn of a large home on the rural outskirts of Waterloo, Ontario. They were there to mark the opening of the Evangelical Lutheran Seminary of Canada. With just four students and one full-time professor, the seminary was modest in size but it had the enthusiastic support of an entire community. Even the most optimistic supporter, however, could not have foreseen how this small religious school would evolve over the next 100 years into a thriving public university with 17,000 students and a national reputation for teaching and research excellence. In Leadership and Purpose: A History of Wilfrid Laurier University, historian Andrew Thomson tells the remarkable story of an academic community whose vision, determination, and perseverance are a testament to the transformative power of education.

Andrew Thomson arrived at Wilfrid Laurier University in the fall of 1976 as an impressionable young high school graduate and left four years later as a Bachelor of the Arts. In the following years he added an M.A. from Laurier and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo. After teaching his first course in Canadian History at Laurier in 1989, he has been employed there regularly as a contract academic. Thomson is an enthusiastic and popular instructor with the Laurier Association for Lifelong Learning. In 2011 he was nominated for a Teaching Excellence Award at the Schulich School of Business at York University.

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