In Memoriam - Douglas Lorimer

Doug Lorimer, a towering presence at Waterloo Lutheran/Wilfrid Laurier University for almost 40 years, passed away on 19 March 2025.  It will be difficult for younger members of the community to grasp Doug’s influence or importance, or to understand how a faculty member could so decisively transform the institution which employed him.  But Doug was an individual of exceptional vision, principle and persistence and he worked in an era when those who loved the university – and Doug was utterly committed to Laurier – could battle collegially over the shape and character of higher education.

Doug, together with a group of activist faculty, including Joyce, his wife, fellow historian and soulmate, spearheaded the certification of the Wilfrid Laurier Faculty Association (WLUFA) in 1988.  He was chief negotiator for the first contract, and for several subsequent contracts, and he was so highly respected as a negotiator that he was also named chief negotiator for the first two Contract Academic Staff and Librarians contracts.  Doug was the moral center of the faculty unionism at WLU; older faculty and staff will vividly recall him gravely, deliberately, powerfully contesting points at Senate or electrifying a WLUFA meeting when calling for a strike vote. 

Doug was committed to the idea that process was as important as result. Goals had to be pursued transparently, made tangible in language and codified in rules.  That message was communicated nationally through his service to the union movement.  As Chair of both the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Collective Bargaining Committees, he helped educate a generation of union negotiators; in recognition of their contributions, OCUFA established its Collective Bargaining Award in Doug and Joyce’s names.  

Doug obtained his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1972.  During his doctoral studies he taught as an instructor at the University of Liverpool, and it was there that he found his two lifelong loves: Joyce and the Everton Football Club.  A historian of ideas, Doug’s scholarship focused on Victorian and Edwardian thought, science and language. His two scholarly monographs and numerous articles show the evolution of his thinking about race and racism as he immersed himself in discourse, post-structural and anti-colonial theory.  In his first book, Doug studied the dependence of racialization on class status in Britain and he saw their entanglement decades before “intersectionality” was given a name and a theory.  But Doug came to see the language of race as even more fluid and contested in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain than he had previously suggested.  In his incisive second book, Doug urges us to reject the notion that the Victorians originated biological racism and to focus instead on their invention of a language of race relations, a discursive area where ideas were nuanced and conflicted and where space was provided for resistance to race-thinking.

Doug was a scholar and activist of singular importance.  He was also kind, thoughtful and a steadfast friend.  Throughout his life he fought against injustice and inequality, for the Humanities, for the university, and for his colleagues.  He will be missed by all who loved and learned from him.