Struggling Universities: Simon Fraser University and the Crisis of Canadian Public Education

Abstract

This article surveys the recent transformation of Simon Fraser University (SFU) against the backdrop of the crisis of Canadian public post-secondary education. The article contends that the Canadian model for the public funding of mass higher education that became consolidated in the postwar years is coming to an end, and that the metamorphosis of SFU over recent decades illuminates some of the tensions, tendencies and conflicts within what the Edu-factory Collective (2010) has called a “double crisis”: that of the university on the one hand, and of the global financial system on the other. Three processes in particular are at the heart of this transformation: a) the increasing importance of private capital, management and branding of the university in an era of decreased public funding; b) the university’s expansion across the urban fabric, in a process that brings displacement and gentrification; and c) the emergence of hybrid public-private models of educational delivery that cater to global markets for tuition dollars. Within this transformation, the article also points to lines of tension that are emerging out of these processes, creating conflicts and moments of encounter between the labour organizations, student groups and anti-gentrification activists struggling against the what Andrew Ross (2009) has called the “global university.”