Build it, and they will come. That could well have been the motto for the early leaders of SFU who, after much debate and planning, chose Burnaby Mountain as home for B.C.'s newest university.
Burnaby was still a developing community with a population of about 85,000 at the time, and Burnaby Mountain was totally undeveloped.
But the planners were right: the university atop the hill would not just grow but thrive, becoming a world-renowned educational facility over the coming five decades.
The first step was taken in July 1963, when the province passed the University Act, which established two new schools to join UBC - these would ultimately become the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University.
Under tight deadlines, with an opening date scheduled for September 1965, famed architects Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey won a competition to design the school.
Construction began in the spring of '64 and, by the fall of 1965, the school was ready to welcome the first 2,500 students under the leadership of the school's first chancellor, Gordon Shrum.
That first year, the school had just six building: the Academic Quadrangle, which has long been the centrepiece of the campus, along with Convocation Mall, the gymnasium, the library, a theatre and a science centre.
The school was known as a political hot-bed in the early years, with student protests a regular occurrence on campus, as well as student-led community activities and fundraisers held regularly.
The archived photo at right shows a student blood drive held during the first few years of the school's life.
Nearly five decades on, student activism and community involvement is still alive and well. The NOW visited SFU recently to capture a few shots of current students taking part in a fundraising event for cancer research.
Organized by Club for the Cure, a student organization, the Balding for Dollars event sees dozens of students and staff come out to have their hair shaved off to raise awareness for childhood cancers.
Organizers Jasmine Garcha and Rachel Osterman are just two of the school's now-30,000 strong student body.
As the attendance has grown, the campus has changed - there is now space for 1,766 students in on-campus residences, and the school has more than 1,000 interntaional students from around the world.
SFU is now Burnaby's biggest employer: there are 1,000 faculty members and 6,500 staff members.
And the campus is no longer home to just students and faculty, but to a growing number of residents who are living in UniverCity, Burnaby newest "neighbourhood" development.
The project, a sustainable community of homes, complete with elementary school and a variety of services, already has about 3,000 people living in it.
It's expected that number will grow to 4,500 in the next two years as additional projects are completed.
The continuing growth has prompted plenty of talk about transportation - including an idea to have a gondola system installed to transport people from the Lougheed corridor up to the mountain. Currently, buses and cars travel up the hillside throughout the day - a challenge in icy and cold weather.
In the meantime, the campus will no doubt continue to grow and change - compared to the six buildings on site in 1965, there are now about 100 buildings.
These include the W.A.C. Bennett Library, the Halpern Centre, the pool and fitness centre, Blusson Hall, Saywell Hall, and buildings for a growing number of departments, including biology, kinesiology, chemistry, education, technology, science and more.
Cleary, the school has done something right over the last five decades: it has been rated Canada's best comprehensive university nine times in the annual Maclean's magazine rankings of Canadian universities.
The school recently held its annual open house, welcoming some 19,000 community residents, visitors and family members to the campus.
For more, see www.sfu.ca.
DATELINE 1965
SFU welcomed its first students in fall 1965, a busy year in Canada and beyond. In January that year, the Maple Leaf flag became the official national flag of Canada. In March, 3,500 U.S. Marines arrived in South Vietnam.
Back-to-back tragedies hit B.C. on July 8 and July 9, with the crash of a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight that killed 52 and the Hope Slide, which killed four. In the U.S., Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 civil rights activists marched for four days from Selma, Alabama to the capital and musician Bob Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited. In Burnaby, the hospital approved a 340-bed expansion at Burnaby Hospital.
THEN & NOW - A SPECIAL SERIES EXPLORING THE UNIQUE HISTORY OF BURNABY IN PHOTOS
For most of human existence, there was no way to capture an image of a time or place - except to paint or draw it.
With photography, we have the opportunity to capture a moment in time.
In today's instalment of our ongoing Then & NOW series, reporter Christina Myers has two sets of photos from SFU's past and present: a bird's eye view of Burnaby Mountain shows how much the school campus has physically changed, while shots of students past and present depict a school spirit that's still going strong.
Both reveal a school that has grown, changed and endured through nearly 50 years. Watch our website at www.burnaby now.com for a photo gallery of all the published images from the series so far. Have your own "then and now" story? Email [email protected].
