To the very few women who were teaching in Ontario’s universities at the time of the great expansion in the 1960s, Flora Roy is a legendary figure. To many others, academic colleagues and former students, she has continued to be just that through all the years since....Flora Roy is unique among Canadian academics. She shepherded her department through perilous times without compromising her standards or adjusting them to meet the noisy demands of fad or faction. The successes and devotion of her students are her continuing testimony.”
— Clara Thomas, Canadian Woman Studies

Building on the success of her first volume, Recollections of Waterloo College, Flora Roy’s Recollections of Waterloo Lutheran University 1960-1973 continues her personal and anecdotal history of Wilfrid Laurier University. This memoir picks up the story following the institutions transition from Waterloo College, a small college affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, to the independent Waterloo Lutheran University. Documenting student demonstrations and faculty unrest of the 1960s as well as the university’s evolution from a religious to a secular institution, this illustrated book will appeal not only to alumni but to those interested in the history of Kitchener-Waterloo and of postsecondary education in Ontario.

The royalties from the sale of this book will be directed towards funding scholarships.

From 1948 until her retirement in 1978, Flora Roy taught courses in almost every period of English literature, including Old and Middle English and eighteenth-century (her own specialization). She established English 348 (World Literature) in 1963 and taught it until 1978. After retirement, she developed and taught courses in Irish and children’s literature.

Flora Roy's profile page

''This is an excellent companion volume to Roy's first one, Recollections of Waterloo College. Together the two make a major contribution to the histories of universities in Canada. There will undoubtedly be other and lengthier histories of Wilfrid Laurier but, I firmly believe, there will never be one published that has been written with such economy, authority, and authenticity as Flora Roy's two volumes.''

Canadian Woman Studies, Vo. 26 #1, Winter/Spring 2007

''It has become conventional recently in academic circles to avoid [the] use of the title 'Doctor,' presumably out of deference to the medical profession, but Dr. Roy has thus been known on the campus of her university for so long that it strikes us as incongruous to use any other form of address or reference. It is worth recalling, furthermore, that the original meaning of the word 'doctor' is teacher, and no one is worthier of that designation than Flora Roy. Dr. Roy has been a teacher--an inspired and distinguished one--virtually all her adult life; and for the past thirty years she has been professor and head of the English Department at the institution known successively as Waterloo College, Waterloo Lutheran University, and (since 1973) Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario.''

James Doyle