Simon Fraser University


Simon Fraser University is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby, Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from downtown Vancouver, was established in 1965 and comprises more than 37,000 students and 200,000 alumni. The university was created in an effort to expand higher education across Canada. In 2025, it became the first university in Canada to adopt university-wide open scholarship principles.
Simon Fraser University is a member of multiple national and international higher education associations, including the Association of Commonwealth Universities, International Association of Universities, and Universities Canada. SFU has also partnered with other universities and agencies to operate joint research facilities such as the TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, which houses the world's largest cyclotron, and Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, a major centre for teaching and research in marine biology.
Undergraduate and graduate programs at SFU operate on a year-round, three-semester schedule. In 2015, SFU became the second Canadian university to receive accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.

History

Simon Fraser University was founded upon the recommendation of a 1962 report entitled Higher Education in British Columbia and a Plan for the Future by John B. Macdonald. He recommended the creation of a new university in the Lower Mainland and the British Columbia Legislature gave formal assent on March 1, 1963, for the establishment of the university in Burnaby. The university was named after Simon Fraser, a North West Company fur trader and explorer. In May of the same year, Gordon M. Shrum was appointed as the university's first chancellor. From a variety of sites that were offered, Shrum recommended to the provincial government that the summit of Burnaby Mountain, 365 meters above sea level, be chosen for the new university. Architects Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey won a competition to design the university, and construction began in the spring of 1964. The campus faces northwest over Burrard Inlet. Eighteen months later, on September 9, 1965, the university began its first semester with 2,500 students.
The campus was noted in the 1960s and early 1970s as a hotbed of political activism, culminating in a crisis in the Department of Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology in a dispute involving ideological differences among faculty. The resolution to the crisis included the dismantling of the department into today's separate departments. During this time, Thelma Finlayson became the university's first female faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences. She would later become their first professor emerita upon her retirement in 1979.

21st century

In 2007, the university began offering dual and double degree programs by partnering with international universities, such as a dual computing-science degree through partnership with Zhejiang University in China and a double Bachelor of Arts degree in conjunction with Australia's Monash University. It has also partnered with India's IIT Bombay.
In 2009, SFU became the first Canadian university to be accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Starting in the 2011–2012 season, SFU competed in the NCAA's Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference and has now transitioned all 19 Simon Fraser teams into the NCAA. In November 2025 the school announced it would leave the NCAA and join U Sports stating that them continuing to compete in the NCAA was unsustainable due to financial and logistical restraints.
On September 9, 2015, SFU celebrated its 50th anniversary. Over its 50 years, the university educated over 130,000 graduates.
A breach of SFU's systems in February 2020 exposed the records of 250,000 students. A second attack in February 2021 resulted in the exposure of 200,000 records. A class action lawsuit was filed against SFU in March 2021.
In early 2022, Burnaby City Council announced they would officially support the SFU Gondola as part of the TransLink expansion project. This is included in the Mayors' Council's approval of the Transport 2050 regional transportation strategy announcement.
In early 2025, SFU's School of Interactive Arts and Technology debuted their Virtual Ambassador Program, hailed as "the world's first official university VTubers".

Campuses

Simon Fraser University has three campuses, each located in different parts of Greater Vancouver. SFU's original campus is located in Burnaby, atop Burnaby Mountain. The Vancouver campus consists of multiple buildings in downtown Vancouver and the Surrey campus is located inside Central City.
The downtown campus has expanded to include several other buildings in recent years, including the Segal Graduate School of Business. In September 2010, SFU Contemporary Arts moved into the Woodward's redevelopment, known as the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
SFU's three campuses are all accessible by public transit. The Vancouver campus is a block away from the Waterfront SkyTrain station while the Surrey campus is adjacent to the Surrey Central SkyTrain station. The Burnaby campus is linked to the Production Way–University, Burquitlam, and Sperling–Burnaby Lake SkyTrain stations by frequent shuttle bus service.

Burnaby campus

The main campus is located atop Burnaby Mountain, on Traditional Coast Salish Lands, including the Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Squamish and Musqueam Nations. The campus is at an elevation of 365 metres, overlooking the Burrard inlet to the north. All major departments in the university are housed at the Burnaby campus. The library on the main campus is called the W. A. C. Bennett Library, named after the Social Credit Premier of B.C. who established it. The campus also has two gym complexes, named the Lorne-Davies Complex and Chancellor's Gym. An international-sized swimming pool is located within the Lorne-Davies Complex. Since the School of Contemporary Arts relocation to the Woodward's location, the Burnaby campus production theatre has been vacant. Located within the heart of the campus are the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and three art galleries. The campus has been awarded numerous architectural awards over the years, including the gold medal for Lieutenant-Governor 2009 Awards in Architecture and the 2007 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Prix du XXe siècle.
The Burnaby campus is composed of a vast complex of interconnected buildings spanning across of land on Burnaby Mountain, from the eastern end of the campus to the western side, where the UniverCity urban village is located. The campus consists of the following buildings:
  • West Mall Complex
  • Lorne Davies Gym Complex
  • Chancellor's Gym Complex
  • Convocation Mall
  • W. A. C. Bennett Library
  • Halpern Centre
  • Maggie Benston Centre
  • SFU Theatre
  • Gym, Pool, Fitness Centre
  • Robert C. Brown Hall
  • Academic Quadrangle
  • Shrum Science Centre
  • * SSC Biology
  • * SSC Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology
  • * SSC Chemistry
  • * SSC Physics
  • South Science Building
  • Applied Sciences Building
  • Education Building
  • Technology and Science Complex I
  • Technology and Science Complex II
  • * 4D LABS
  • Blusson Hall
  • Saywell Hall
  • Strand Hall
  • Trottier Observatory and Science Courtyard
  • Student Union Building
Due to the contemporary Brutalist architecture of the Burnaby Mountain campus, many buildings, including the WAC Bennett Library and Academic Quadrangle have been used for location shots in various films and television programmes over the years.

Library, archives, museums and galleries

Each campus has its own library, the largest of which is the W.A.C. Bennett Library based on the SFU Burnaby campus, which holds over 2.7 million print and microform volumes.
SFU also has a Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, which holds many exhibits created by students as part of the museum studies courses offered in the Department of Archaeology. Archaeological collections arising from excavations and other research by faculty, staff and students are housed in the museum. Several large wooden sculptures poles from the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria represent the major art traditions of the indigenous coastal peoples of British Columbia. The museum holds an extensive collection of Indonesian wayang kulit shadow puppets and ethnographic objects from around the world. The museum's image collection holds over 120,000 35 mm slides and digital images of archaeological and ethnographic interest.
The SFU Library's Digital Collections provide internet access to digitized documents from a number of archival collections, such as Harrison Brown's Xi'an Incident collection, and the history of British Columbia and Western Canada in general, including documents from the Doukhobor migration from the Russian Empire to Saskatchewan and then to British Columbia assembled for donation to the university by John Keenlyside. Other highlights of the collection include The Vancouver Punk Collection, which includes more than 1200 posters as well as photographs, zines, and ephemera, the British Columbia Postcards Collection, and more than 9800 editorial cartoons from Canadian newspapers.
Simon Fraser University's art galleries include: SFU Gallery on the Burnaby campus, Audain Gallery at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts in Vancouver, and Teck Gallery at Harbour Centre in Vancouver. SFU Galleries stewards the Simon Fraser University Art Collection, which includes, in its holdings of over 5,500 works, significant regional and national artworks spanning the last century.
The Bill Reid Centre for Northwest Coast Art Studies at SFU houses a collection of 50,000 objects, primarily digital images and digitized textual documents, which document the art, culture and history of different First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast. The collection includes explorers' drawings, sketches, paintings and original photography.