A referee officiates an NCAA match between the UCLA Bruins and the Tennessee Volunteers during the second round of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., on March 22.Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Brian Green is the executive director of the SFU Faculty Association and adjunct professor of Labour Studies. Jennifer Scott is the director of Labour Relations for the SFU Faculty Association and adjunct professor of English. The following represents the views of the authors, not necessarily those of the Faculty Association of SFU.
Since his inauguration, universities and colleges have garnered particular attention from U.S. President Donald Trump. He has used funding cuts, both real and threatened, to interfere in university governance, frozen research grants and cancelled contracts based on claims of antisemitism and “wokeness,” and directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain, and at times deport, students for participation in protest or critical campus journalism.
In Canada, some universities have responded by prioritizing defending the intellectual and physical freedom of students and faculty, and offering safe harbour for academics who no longer feel safe in the United States.
One institution, however, remains economically and legally embedded with the American university system through its athletics program: Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby B.C., has, since 2010, been the sole foreign member of the U.S. collegiate sports league, the NCAA.
SFU’s decision to abandon Canadian sports was fiercely protested at the time, and in the years since, has resulted in tens of millions of dollars in costs and the cancellation of the university’s football program in 2023. Today, SFU’s membership in the NCAA is once again drawing criticism and leading to calls to withdraw and re-invest in Canadian athletics. The original concern – to stand alone with the American league rather than join all other Canadian universities in collegiate sport – remains, but Mr. Trump has provided still more urgent reasons for SFU to reconsider.
SFU’s continued involvement in the NCAA not only runs counter to efforts to prioritize our national autonomy, at a time when Mr. Trump is threatening the country’s sovereignty, but actively threatens the human rights and security of Canada’s student athletes. There is first the general risk all students currently face in the U.S.: almost daily we see stories of students and others facing arbitrary arrest and detention by ICE even when legally in the country, as in the prominent cases of Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, both of whom have been detained and threatened with deportation regardless of their legal status. These general risks are especially acute given Mr. Trump’s proposed travel ban that would see people from 43 countries entirely banned from or severely restricted in their ability to enter the U.S. This is a sweeping expansion of his 2017 executive order, which at the time elicited public statements from Universities Canada and individual institutions including the University of Toronto, McGill and the University of British Columbia, who noted the threat this action poses to both students and faculty on temporary visas, whose recognized legal status could not presumed to be respected by American authorities.
A second issue relates to the NCAA specifically, which recently – following an Executive Order from the President – announced a policy change banning transgender women from participating in women’s sport. For SFU, this places its NCAA participation in direct conflict with Canada’s Human Rights Act, which was amended in 2016 to include gender identity and gender expression as protected grounds, and with the B.C. Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, raising the question: Will SFU prioritize its continued participation in American collegiate sport or the legal rights of student athletes in Canada?
As these issues arise, concerns regarding SFU’s continued NCAA membership are once again being voiced across the university community, with an open letter and petition circulating which calls on the SFU to take concrete action in response to the evidence that NCAA membership both places student athletes in general at risk (by requiring travel to a country where student visas offer little legal protection), and also effectively ends the collegiate sports careers of trans women athletes, contrary to Canadian human rights law.
Canada has a proud tradition of independent, domestic collegiate sport. If SFU’s decision to abandon Canada’s athletic programs raised eyebrows in 2010, the reasons to reconsider are now urgent and material: in the context of the current trade war, active threats to Canadian sovereignty, and direct, explicit violations of the human rights of trans athletes and students on temporary visas, it is time for SFU to withdraw from the NCAA, re-invest in Canadian collegiate sport, and prioritize the safety and security of student athletes over the arbitrary and discriminatory directives of the Trump administration.