Status of Project

August 2007

We have proposed a residential College project to accommodate about 100 graduate students and some new and visiting faculty members. There would also be a common lounge, seminar room and dining room to seat 100. Such an arrangement could be an inducement for outstanding graduate students who are thinking of attending Simon Fraser.

The proposal is for all doctoral candidates at SFU to be members of the College. Members not accommodated would be encouraged to use the College as an intellectual and social center whether in the day or the evening.

A study was completed for the University in 2006 to define the business feasibility and design possibilities of building a College at different sites. Two or three sites have been identified as ideal, each with constraints and unique opportunities. One is very near the town square in UniverCity, one is in the cluster of residences on the western side of SFU.

The College has already involved dozens of doctoral students in the President’s Lectures and the dinners which followed (see archive page). Grateful acknowledgement is made of the generosity of the President’s office, and the Vice President Academic, in making these collegial evenings possible for doctoral students. We also acknowledge the great role of the Munro Lecture, managed by the Dean of Graduate Studies, in stimulating discussion of the College among doctoral students. Finally, the College has cosponsored lectures and seminars with the SFU Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, and with the Institute for the Humanities (with the financial assistance of the Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation). We have established a Burnaby Mountain College Development Fund, a Friends of the College list, and a doctoral student member list.

The College was visited in July 2005 by the President of Clare Hall, a college at the University of Cambridge. Geophysicist Professor Ekhard Slaje is one of the honourary advisors to Burnaby Mountain College, and met with President Michael Stevenson to advise on college development. Clare Hall is a modern college for doctoral students, and is, like SFU, 40 years old. President Stevenson also met in Cambridge in May 2005 with physicist Professor Haroon Ahmed. Master of Corpus Christi College, an institution now 650 years old. Professor Salje and Professor Ahmed have both agreed to advise us over the long run.

DOCTORAL STUDENTS AT SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

The number of doctoral students in 2006 was 930

There has been a substantial increase in admissions, and in 2005-2006 SFU had admitted over one hundred more new doctoral students than it did in 1998/1999.

1998/99 = 127

1999/00 = 128

2000/01 = 124

2001/02 = 151

2002/03 = 152

2003/04 = 167

2004/05 = 194

2005/06 = 232

2006/07 = 286