Colin Hansen "Rewarding" History of Sexual Harassment at SFU

Colin Hansen is rewarding sexual harassment. That’s how a former SFU student views a visit by BC’s Minister of Economic Development two weeks ago to deliver $13.3 million in cheques to the Simon Fraser University Center for the Contemporary Arts. The cheques delivered on March 28th are part of a promise by Premier Gordon Campbell last year to give $49.5-million in provincial dollars to the School for Contemporary Arts on the Downtown Eastside.

Hansen made no mention of the Center’s 20-year history of evading responsibility for the alleged operation of a sexual harassment ring of male professors. It is a history that has been festering much like that of native residential schools abuse or pedophile priests festered for decades.

Hansen presented the cheques from an outdoor podium at a construction site for new Center for the Contemporary Arts studios on Hastings St., directly across the street from the Center’s old visual arts studios (middle building in photo above) where sexual harassment had allegedly been rampant for years. But Hansen’s ‘out with the old, in with the new’ hoopla has not caught on with the woman who claims she dropped out due to sexual harassment. “I have trouble even walking by there”, says the woman who now lives in the low income Downtown Eastside neighborhood. “As the years go by, it doesn’t get any better. I make a point of not looking at the building.”