“I joined Osiris in my junior yr at a gathering of all the group at a proper dinner on the Membership of Odd Volumes in Boston,” remembers Tom Burns ’62, SM ’63. “On the time, we had been requested to be someplace in Boston in a tuxedo [and] had been blindfolded and pushed round for some time by a senior member of the Society, ending up on the Membership to be confronted by a big group of college and pupil members.” (A written description of initiations within the Nineteen Sixties says that tuxedo-clad initiates sometimes had been advised to carry out a stunt—similar to flying paper airplanes in entrance of a ticket counter at Logan—whereas ready to get picked up.) Whereas two annual conferences had been held on the membership, Burns says school members sometimes hosted the common dinner conferences, many in Killian’s penthouse condo at 100 Memorial Drive. Pupil members had been liable for deciding on the matters and main the discussions, he says, and picked the following yr’s inductees.
After all, inviting many successive editors of the MIT pupil newspaper to hitch a society with such a secret objective was inherently dangerous. Positive sufficient, on February 18, 1955, The Tech ran a front-page article with the headline “Pupil Leaders Meet With Administration and School In Secret Society, Osiris.” The article was unsigned, as had been all information articles on the time, however Stephen N. Cohen ’56, then editor of The Tech, seems on the Osiris membership rolls. (Tellingly, the following three editors—John A. Friedman ’57, Leland E. Holloway Jr. ’58, and Stewart Wade Wilson ’59—don’t.) Per week later, Eldon H. Reiley ’55, president of MIT’s Undergraduate Affiliation, president of the Institute Committee, and a member of Osiris, printed an 11-paragraph assertion in The Tech saying, amongst different issues, that “Osiris is a casual group of college and college students who meet infrequently over dinner and focus on points pertaining to the welfare and betterment of MIT. The group has no energy in itself.”
Reiley wrote the reality: Nowhere within the archives or in interviews with surviving members is there a touch that the coed members of Osiris determined something apart from the names of the following yr’s recruits.
Howard Wesley Johnson was inducted as an honorary member in 1965, shortly earlier than changing into MIT’s twelfth president in 1966. Johnson clearly took his Osiris duties significantly: Its conferences had been entered into his appointment ebook, and when he missed the initiation in 1968, he wrote “to the lads of OSIRIS,” apologizing that “enterprise in protection of M.I.T. calls for that I be absent.”
Johnson’s letter hints on the forces that finally put an finish to the group: Osiris was a relic of the previous—for instance, it had no feminine members till 1969—and MIT was below assault within the current.
“I used to be added in 1969 once I was vice chairman of the Graduate Pupil Council,” remembers Marvin Sirbu Jr. ’66, ’67, SM ’68, EE ’70, ScD ’73. “I keep in mind how outstanding it was that college students and college/directors met and talked informally in the way in which that they did at Osiris conferences.”
TECHNIQUE 1904
As we speak Howard Johnson’s presidency is remembered for his deft dealing with of pupil unrest, together with three days in November 1969 when greater than a thousand folks protested the Institute’s relationship with the US Division of Protection. The documentary November Actions consists of movie from conferences of a joint committee of college and college students that helped defuse the state of affairs. Whereas lots of the college students had been members of Osiris, they had been current as a result of they had been elected pupil leaders, not as a result of they belonged to the key society. However Sirbu means that the Osiris conferences might clarify why these within the room felt so snug with one another.
Handwritten minutes from two conferences within the spring of 1971 reveal that matters mentioned included marijuana, civility in Osiris conferences, and the potential reemergence of McCarthyism on campus. An article in The Tech reported that matters similar to analysis coverage and housing had been additionally typical. However Osiris was in decline. That March, Grey had noticed that 34 folks had
RSVPed “sure” for the March 16 assembly, however solely 27 had proven up—and that “actives” (pupil members) had been outnumbered by “over thirties” by about three to at least one.
