On October 24, 1968, the American student leader Jerry Rubin led several hundred UBC students into the UBC Faculty Club as a form of protest against authority. Rubin left soon after the sit-in began, but the Club was occupied by the students for the next 24 hours, during which time (according to The Ubyssey) they “participated in such activities as drinking the faculty liquor, smoking their cigarettes, doing up dope, climbing over furniture, burning dollar bills and an American flag, swimming nude in the patio pool and basically enjoying themselves…” (October 25, 1968, p. 03). One such student was Peter Scurr (B.Ed. ’72), who took the photographs reproduced below.
Other photographs may be found in the UBC Archives at https://open.library.ubc.ca/search?q=faculty%20club%20sit%20in&collection=arphotos. To read The Ubyssey‘s coverage of this event, see their October 25th 1968 issue. UBC Reports ran a commemorative story about the sit-in in its issue for December 6th 2007 (pp. 1, 5). See also UBC: The First 100 Years by Eric Damer and Herbert Rosengarten (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2009) p. 204. A copy of this book is held by The Legacy Project and is also available at the Vancouver Public Library.
