SFU students rally Wednesday, demanding tuition freeze after strike interrupted classes

Students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) rallied at the Burnaby campus Wednesday to demand that the university address their tuition cost concerns.

The protest was organized by the SFU Undergrad Student Solidarity and had three core demands.

The first, and most important according to the students, is a reimbursement for three weeks of interruptions during the teacher assistant strike earlier this year.

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“I lost weeks of teaching and that’s not the fault of the union, that’s the fault of the university for refusing to negotiate. And for value lost for our degrees and for the education that we’re paying for as a result of their refusal to negotiate,” Adriana Cumming-Teicher, a fifth-year undergraduate student at SFU, told CityNews.

Cumming-Teicher adds the other demand is a tuition freeze, “as inflation progresses, cost of living goes up, the housing crisis deepens, income and inequality deepens” the university is becoming extremely unaffordable.

“SFU is allowing weeks of education to go unmet by their own refusal to negotiate, cutting student services and destroying community spaces … while we are paying more year over year, even as a domestic student.”

She adds that the last demand is capping the tuition of international students. Although Cumming-Teicher is a domestic student, she sees “friends being crushed by gigantic fees that consistently increase.”

Artin Safaei, a second-year political science student at SFU, tells CityNews that there is a two per cent raise for domestic students, which is the max legally allowed by provincial legislation in B.C., and a four per cent increase for international students.

Safaei also says that the Teaching Support Staff Union at the school has been demanding and asking for negotiations for years.

He adds that when the teacher strike happened earlier this year, the university said they had tabled a proposal, but the union did not agree to the offer.

He says that “what they saw from the administration was not tolerance but rather the university applying any tactics[hiring a private investigator, and coming to meetings unprepared] to … not allow a negotiation to take place.”

According to Safaei, the organization has a calculator where you can put in your courses and the level to see how much you are owed.

“The amount owed to the student body is around $22 million,” he claimed.

“Not only is the university not taking steps to better our education and better the conditions of the students and the instructors…they’re actually working against it and to us that is unacceptable,” said Safaei.

-With files from Liza Yuzda