PREAMBLE to all Simon Fraser posts

Simon Fraser University (SFU) opened in September 1965 as one of the new institutions created across Canada in the late 1960s to allow students wider access to post-secondary education.  It was built on Burnaby Mountain on the Eastern, mostly working class side of greater Vancouver.  The intent was to attract the new students whose parents had not gone to university so that the University of British Columbia (UBC) could remain the university for the established and better off.  Or at least that was the plan and the expectation of right populist (Social Credit) premier WAC Bennett who commissioned BC Hydro chief and former chair of engineering at UBC Gordon Shrum to create an East side instant university.  It would have an Education faculty for public school teachers but otherwise none of the medical, law and engineering professional schools that UBC had.  SFU was expected to stress undergraduate sciences rather than the liberal arts. 

From the very first days the reality of SFU departed from the script.  To his credit, Shrum looked for the best and brightest of young faculty regardless of their academic or political tendencies.  He especially recruited faculty from Britain and Commonwealth countries and the United States.  Graduate students and even undergraduates were attracted to the new university from elsewhere in Canada by its quickly acquired reputation for taking new approaches to both curriculum content and learning methods.  It also didn’t hurt that SFU was on the West Coast, center of the emerging youth counterculture.   SFU was a place of cross fertilization for both teachers and students coming from different countries and from different parts of Canada who shared the overriding high ideals and aspirations of a younger generation. 

Simon Fraser also developed very quickly into a close-knit community which had a strong sense of shared collective identity and purpose.   This was an important factor in the very high degree of mobilization of the members of that community in all of its major conflicts.  Most everyone felt they had a stake in the outcomes of those conflicts. 

One reason for the strong sense of community was simple geography. It took 40 to 60 plus minutes to drive by car or go by bus from the Burnaby Mountain campus to downtown Vancouver or to one of the East side working class suburbs.   Faculty, students and staff alike tended to stay on campus for most of the day in between classes.  

Another reason was the architecture and layout of the new campus.  The architects Massey and Erickson had intentionally built the facilities and buildings around a central open area quickly termed “the mall” where Athenian democracy could be practiced – as indeed it was from opening day.  The mall was placed in the center of an oblong campus with the buildings and facilities located so that everyone would pass by the mall area several times a day – and might get drawn in to what was going on there. 

But the most important reason was probably a demographic and social one: faculty and students at SFU from 1965-66 to 1969-70 were close in age, with students in their late teens or early twenties (1960s SFU offered a chance for a significant number of “mature students” to go to university) and many faculty in their late 20s or early thirties.  This not only made socializing between teachers and students far more likely than at most other campuses, it also meant that most faculty were very early in their careers and did not yet have the job protection of tenure.  And because Simon Fraser had been built and faculty hired in a very short period of time, the university had no established procedures governing hiring and firing and promotion and tenure.  The actual power to make those decisions was still exercised by Chancellor Shrum and the academic administrators he had appointed.  Hence most faculty shared the concern of many students regarding the lack of control over university decision-making by either faculty or students.  Most had strong personal reasons to support struggles against arbitrary decisions by the Board and its allies.  In the early years a sizeable number of faculty were even willing to support proposals by radical students for extensive shared student-faculty decision-making power.  

SFU quickly acquired the reputation of a ‘radical campus’.  It was frequently compared with the University of California Berkeley.  Like Berkeley, its early reputation for political radicalism, educational quality and innovation, combined with a West Coast counterculture, attracted both left-leaning students and faculty who made it more radical still.  Also like Berkeley, that reputation was well-earned.  The student new left at Simon Fraser engaged in more high level conflicts,  raised and won greater popular student support for more radically democratic demands and won more real student power than anywhere else in English Canada.  

So how and why was the SFU student movement so successful? And what was the nature of the radicalization in consciousness among new left students at SFU from its first year of 1965-66 through 1969-70?

SEPT 1965 TO DEC 1966: SHELL PROTEST UNITES THE BELOVED COMMUNITY

MAJOR CONFLICT:  The first major conflict at Simon Fraser was the Shell protest, which developed in two stages.  In the second and culminating stage, an actual numerical majority of both students and faculty joined in a massive public protest to oppose the granting to Shell Canada of the rights to a gas station on campus in return for financing the new men’s residence.  The deal had garnered a brief mention in the student newspaper The Peak in the Fall 1965 opening semester and then disappeared from view (651027). 

On Wednesday June 15 1966, in the middle of the first summer semester (SFU had three full semesters a year) 300 “angry” students and faculty marched to the site where front end loaders were ploughing up the ground.  The protesters milled around and burned an effigy of a gas pump.  The essentially spontaneous action led the Student Council to hold an emergency meeting the same night where it unanimously adopted a motion expressing “deep regret” at the design and location of the Shell station.  Former Peak editor Sam Steenhuus was chosen to head the “Save the View” committee and mandated to negotiate with Shell and the university administration. 

Negotiations bogged down and Steenhuus was among about 20 student protesters who went to the building site at 5:30am on Tuesday June 21 1966.  They sat in the ditches to block the earth removers, on the walls to prevent building and in front of the surveyors to stop surveying.  (660622).  First year Science student Don Cavers narrowly avoided serious injury when a front end loader driver scooped him up and dropped him four feet.  The militancy of the action and the near injury led to a new meeting involving the presidents of Shell, the university and the Student Council by 9:30am the same day.  Peak editor Allen Garr enthused that the campus had “come alive”.  Yes, “the group of active participants in the protest is indeed small.  These people, however, represent a cross-section of the campus” (660622).

Several compromise options were put to a student referendum on the Friday of the same week but very few students voted and those who did expressed divided opinions.  A week later, The Peak reported that the campaign against Shell had “collapsed”.  Garr opined that the Shell protest “was the closest thing this campus has ever come to a spontaneous student protest”.  In Garr’s mind, the spontaneity proved that the protest was genuine.  It was a hopeful sign that students were casting off their conformism. He blamed the collapse of the campaign on the Student Council that “meddled by imposing an unwarranted and utterly useless committee to direct and control the protest” (660629).

The Shell protest was dormant but not over.  The first issue of The Peak in the Fall 1966 semester printed a blistering letter by philosophy professor David Berg demanding that the entire university Board resign over their role in the “Shell fiasco” because they had “lost the confidence of the entire academic  community”.  Berg’s letter made clear that he meant that the Board was accountable to a single community composed of “students, faculty and interested staff” (660907).   Posters, leaflets and a petition were used to revive the issue through a mall rally featuring speakers from senior faculty, including Arts dean Bottomore and Education dean McKinnon, on Friday September 23 1966.  The massive open air rally was followed by a peaceful march to the Shell site that drew an estimated 1600 students and faculty. 

Nothing changed.  The issue had been lost.  But the protests had united virtually the entire university community in defence of an idea and a reality that had been building since the opening day: Simon Fraser was a single community building a new university where the freedom to experiment and debate and critique was paramount.  Students and faculty must be left alone by the Board and administration to build their own structures and activities, separately and together, from the ground up. 

Almost every student who was at Simon Fraser, especially in the first three years -- before President Strand gathered senior faculty together to impose a set of professional and corporate hierarchical structures -- says some variant on the following: ‘We felt like we were in a community where it was up to us to invent everything from scratch, to decide who we were and how we were going to relate to one another.  And the experimental community was not just students separate from faculty and staff.  It was all of us together’.

CONTEXT:  Simon Fraser students practiced a kind of Athenian democracy from the very beginning.  On the first day of the first semester,  a general meeting was held in the open-air mall to form committees and begin a process of multiple general meetings to debate and decide how to structure the student society (650916). The decision was to create a fairly typical Student Council (although the inclusion of an ombudsman was an innovation), but to make it strictly subject to general meetings.  In law and in fact, the open-air mall and large indoor lecture hall general meeting would be the place where all major issues would be debated and decided for the next five years.

The student newspaper The Peak was created out of a debate between two student newspapers that were initiated from the bottom up, in parallel with the creation of the Student Society.  The Tartan published first.  It stimulated an ostensibly more conservative rival, the SFView, that criticized the Tartan for lacking “dignity” and professionalism and failing to care sufficiently about the university’s image.  Within a week, the staff of the two papers had met and agreed to merge to form The Peak (651013). In its first four semesters, the Peak successfully fought off multiple attempts by the Student Council, and especially the Faculty Council, to censor its content and to control it from above and outside.  It would be the first student newspaper in Canada, and one of the first in North America, to incorporate itself as an entirely independent newspaper (651201, 660607, 660720, 670104).

A third feature of the emerging Simon Fraser community was the frequency with which people responded to problems, including very bread and butter ones that would require a lot of volunteer time to solve, by creating a new structure or demanding that the administration create one.  They followed up by volunteering their time to doing something to solve the problem.  This could involve researching a problem in order to publish proposals for reform, or starting up an alternative institution like a housing co-op or club, or launching a peaceful but confrontational protest action, or any combination of such modes of action.

One of the first was the food services committee, which started up as an informal group of left faculty, led by economist Michael Liebowitz and political scientist Tom Brosie, and several students (650922).  After a successful student-organized “burger boycott” in the student cafeteria, the group was integrated into a formal administration-student-faculty advisory committee that was the prototype for multiple efforts at tripartite advisory committees that lasted up to early 1968 (660316, 660323, 68xxxx).

Another was a faculty-student group that years later would succeed in getting a large complex of co-op houses built near campus. The nucleus of organizers started right away by renting houses for communal living, notably the New Westminister Co-op, and moving in together (670705). 

A student coop bookstore sold new and used books at lower prices (650930). 

There were also more individualistic actions, where there was a widely shared perception of a problem and of the need for a particular kind of solution, and someone just took it upon themselves to do something about it.   One anonymous student with technical skills rewired three faculty-only elevators, including the one going down to the faculty-only Faculty Lounge, so that they could not be locked off to use by students.  S/he won an instant victory, as university president McTaggart-Cowan declared that all elevators thenceforth would be open to all (660330).  This sabotage action was followed later by various petitions and pressure tactics that eventually led to an opening of the Faculty Lounge to all (68xxxx?). 

A fourth feature of early SFU was that students made different choices from what was typical at other universities at the time about what kind of extra-curricular institutions they wished to establish.  Time and time again, the majority chose to reject the model of traditional universities, namely exclusive clubs and fraternities and extras-curricular activities that trained a future elite.  The ‘universities exist to form the future elite’ model centered the university experience around pride in the prestige of being a member of an exclusive group, of meeting and bonding with others who you would continue to connect with later in life, of acquiring the character and knowledge to be a successful member of the future elite.  SFU students rejected this model and the idea of structures built on exclusion and exclusiveness, or at least they repeatedly made choices that led to building a different kind of pride in membership in an intellectual community. 

One such choice was the decision to reject all proposals made to charge special student fees in order to pay for a Student Union Building, that would be owned and operated by a student-controlled corporation.  Most other campuses voted to finance Student Union Buildings.  A SUB gave the Student Council control over important material resources, and therefore enabled it to be ‘independent’ from the university administration and its ‘in loco parentis’.  But there were other, less capitalistic and bureaucratic, ways to establish the independence of student organizations and activities.  SFU students opted instead for a university-funded “Longhouse” which was open to all (660914). 

The Outdoors Club rejected the proposal to center its activities on a private chalet in the Whistler ski resort, opting instead to simply get together and go hiking and get out into the ‘wilds’ and do adventurous things in nature (660202). 

The idea for an Oxbridge style annual rowing competition between SFU and the established university at the other side of town (University of British Columbia, UBC) got nowhere (660126).  

At many other universities, conservative students pushed successfully to get their student society to withdraw from the Canadian Union of Students (CUS).  They typically did so on the grounds that paying fees to CUS took money away from local clubs and services.  They accused CUS national office of pushing local student societies to take stands on off-campus societal issues.  They raised the alarm that CUS-inspired student societies acted like trade unions, by holding mass membership meetings and by mobilizing students into campaigns and collective actions.  The SFU Student Council hesitated to join CUS, and tried more than once to withdraw.  But the student body voted for CUS membership by large majorities every time they had a chance to vote on it (651027, 660323, 660914). 

In the summer and fall of 1966, subsequent Peak editors Allen Garr (660608) and Michael Campbell (660907) used inflammatory anti-union rhetoric to express opposition to the Canada-wide wave of strikes that was front page news throughout 1966.  Peak editorials condemned Student Council president Alex Turner for going to the picket line of the Vancouver civic workers on May 16 1966, to urge SFU and UBC students to stop scabbing.  But the Student Council backed Turner’s action, establishing a tradition that was respected for years afterward of respecting union picket lines. 

Perhaps the most decisive choice made to signal what kind of university community SFU students wanted to build was the rejection of a sustained campaign to set up fraternities and sororities (such as existed at UBC).  By an overwhelming majority, Simon Fraser students instead voted to ban them (660119, 660623).

CHANGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMMITMENT:

Issues and Interests at stake:  Why did ‘saving the view’ by relocating a Shell gas station become the trigger for the first really big protest at SFU?  For both students and faculty and leftists and non-leftists, the issue was more than just a NIMBY desire to get an unsightly building relocated or off campus altogether -- although it was that too.  For almost everyone, it aroused very strong feelings about the need to act together to defend a vision that they all shared.  That something was the belief that there was a ‘we’, a single community that was united in building a kind of utopia on a hill, a place where people were free to experiment and create. 

This notion of community was not necessarily political, in the sense of seeking social change – although it was exactly that for many students and some faculty from early on, and only became more explicitly so over time.  It was at least a sense of building something new together, a place where people were free to find themselves and experiment with new ideas and ways of doing things.  It was an intuitive sense that SFU was a kind of (Athenian) democracy, where everyone in the community could get together from time to time to decide what structures and activities and policies and priorities to establish.  It was a heady feeling of having the same chance as anyone else of initiating something or joining something, as long as it was open to anyone and was accountable to the community. 

Strategy and tactics:  The initial march to the gas station site was spontaneous.  The Student Council immediately reframed the issue from that of opposing granting influence to a private business in exchange for donations, to ‘saving the view’.  They changed it from getting Shell off campus to relocating the site on campus.  They changed the tactic to negotiations to find a face-saving compromise.  Those attempts failed when the negotiations failed.  A more militant sit in by a handful of students tried to get the issue back to where it started with the university community confronting the outside business. 

In the fall of 1966, left faculty and students became more visibly involved in the Shell issue.  Articles by philosopher and co-op housing activist David Berg, and other left-leaning faculty, in the Peak framed the issue as interference by a business-dominated Board in the internal affairs of a community made up of students and ‘concerned staff’ as well as faculty.  Although it is unlikely that a majority of either students or faculty would have supported Berg’s call for Board members to resign, the framing of the issue as one of defending the community from Board “interference” resonated.   The tactic was one of getting people from all parts of the community, including deans and other senior faculty, to declare in words at a rally that the entire community was united around that stance.

Changes in understandings and goals:  The Peak contains little mention of the ideas and views of new left students in relation to the Shell mobilization.  At the time of the September 23 rally, new left student Malcolm Fast argued in the Peak that the university should “be a place for liberating people from the limitations of their culture”, but that SFU had not reached that level yet.  A university “can intervene in society and still remain academic”.  However, “it is not the university as a corporate body which must learn to intervene.  It is those that work in and around the university that must do so”.  Addressing himself to his fellow SFU students, Fast concluded: “[T]herefore, I suggest that you leave SFU for a while.  Decide what you believe in and go into the community and work for it” and then “you will be ready to participate [in creating] a great university” (660921).

SFU stood out as different from all other Canadian universities of the period in the nature of its faculty.  There were a lot more young faculty and visibly many more left-wing faculty (certainly if we define this as meaning people who acted left-wing in public and risked their careers in doing so) than anywhere else.  Faculty mixed with students more than most other places too, despite a few structures like a separate Faculty Lounge and separate Faculty elevators.  Many people at the time attributed some of the informal closeness of faculty to students to the adoption of the British system of tutorials accompanying lectures, but those were led by grade student Tas not professors.  It is more likely that there was simply a sufficiently large minority of young and left-leaning faculty that simply wanted to be more informal in their relations with students, both in the lecture hall and outside of it.

What impact did this have on the attitudes, beliefs and actions of the SFU students?  The fact that some faculty seemed to genuinely want to explore new and progressive approaches in their teaching, helped make it legitimate for students to take liberal and left-wing ideas seriously when they were spouted by left-wing students. In the many different major political crisis events in SFU’s history, more than a few individual teachers spoke out at the mass rallies in support of the student side in the dispute.  Signals from the top can make a big difference – this is a recurrent finding in the study of mass-level changes in social attitudes (e.g. attitudes towards gay marriage) and of the periods of when masses of people are willing to join risky challenges to the power and privileges of people higher than them in the social structure.

For example, it made a difference that a small but very visible minority of people in the elites turned against the Vietnam war in 1968.  It made it possible for many people to do so publicly without being immediately smeared as ‘communists’ and ‘traitors’, or at least to be able to withstand it.  But the American population would have turned against the war eventually anyway, only differently and likely with a lot more repression and violence. 

Similarly, the presence of a sizeable minority of left-thinking faculty made SFU different from most other universities of the time.  It made left-wing framings of issues quickly predominant as a discourse, or at least a kind of reference point, if not quite the accepted common sense, for the community.  It was okay to be left.  It did not make you deviant in a bad way, to ask those kind of questions and consider those kind of answers. 

But the students were very much the authors of their own actions.  Part of what it meant to be a progressive professor was to respect the autonomy of students, inside the classroom and out.  And students started from the first day of classes in September 1965 to meet in mass gatherings and create their own structures and activities, and to take stands on issues and wage their own campaigns.  They started doing all this before they had had a chance to be directly influenced by whatever this or that faculty member said or did. 

It was likely the absence of established hierarchies, among either the faculty or the students, that was the biggest factor in creating the fertile ground for considering left and liberal ideas at SFU.  No faculty had tenure, or more importantly was in the privileged yet high-pressure and vulnerable position of being on a tenure track.  Even the most conservative among them could see that they needed to act as a group, to win legally binding procedures for tenure, promotions, hiring and firing, before they could succeed in the usual individualistic professional career path way.  Senior faculty had no carrots, and few sticks, to keep the younger faculty in line. Simon Fraser provided lots of fertile ground for growing a movement, but it was still up to left-leaning students and faculty to do the work to actually grow one.  And they certainly did.