“I joined Osiris as a junior at a full-group meeting at a formal dinner at the Club of Odd Volumes in Boston,” recalls Tom Burns ’62, SM ’63. “At that time we were asked to be somewhere in Boston in tuxedos (and) a senior member of the club blindfolded us and drove around for a while, so we ended up with a large group of faculty and student members in the club.” (A 1960s written account of initiations says that tuxedo-clad initiates were typically told to perform a stunt—such as flying paper airplanes in front of Logan’s ticket desk—while waiting to be picked up.) Although two annual meetings were held. held at the club, Burns says faculty members typically host regular dinner meetings, many in Killian’s penthouse at 100 Memorial. Drive. The student members were responsible for choosing the topics and leading the discussions, he says, and chose the next year’s members.
Of course, inviting many successive editors of the MIT student newspaper into such a society with a secret purpose was inherently risky. Indeed, February 18, 1955, The Tech published a front-page article titled “Student leaders meet administration and faculty in secret society, Osiris.” The article was unsigned, as were all news articles at the time, but Stephen N. Cohen ’56, then editor The Techappears in the Osiris membership lists. (Clearly, the next three editors—John A. Friedman ’57, Leland E. Holloway Jr. ’58, and Stewart Wade Wilson ’59—do not.) A week later, Eldon H. Reiley ’55, president of the MIT Undergraduate Education Association , chairman of the institute’s committee and a member of Osiris, published an 11-paragraph statement in The Tech saying, among other things, that “Osiris is an informal group of faculty and students who meet for dinner from time to time and discuss matters related to the well-being and improvement of MIT. The group itself has no power.”
Reiley wrote the truth: There is no suggestion in any of the archives or interviews with surviving members that the student members of Osiris decided on anything other than the names of the next year’s recruits.
Howard Wesley Johnson was inducted as an honorary member in 1965, shortly before becoming MIT’s 12th president in 1966. Johnson clearly took his Osiris mission seriously: its meetings were recorded in his appointment book, and when he left the dedication in 1968, he wrote “To the Men of OSIRIS” , lamenting that “the defense of MIT requires me to be away.”
Johnson’s letter hints at the forces that ultimately brought the organization to an end: Osiris was a relic of the past—for example, it had no female members until 1969—and MIT was under attack in the present.
“I was inducted in 1969 when I was vice president of the Graduate Student Council,” Marvin Sirbu Jr. recalls. ’66, ’67, SM ’68, EE ’70, ScD ’73. “I remember how significant it was to have students and faculty/administrators meet and talk informally in the same way as Osiris meetings.”
TECHNOLOGY 1904
Today, Howard Johnson’s presidency is remembered for his deft handling of student unrest, including three days in November 1969 when more than a thousand people protested the institute’s relationship with the US Department of Defense. Document November activities includes film of the joint faculty-student committee meetings that helped defuse the situation. Although many of the students were members of Osiris, they were present because they were elected as student leaders, not because they belonged to a secret society. But Sirbu suggests that the Osiris meetings may explain why those in the room felt so comfortable with each other.
Handwritten minutes of two meetings held in the spring of 1971 reveal that topics of discussion included marijuana, civility at Osiris meetings, and the possible emergence of McCarthyism on campus. In the article The Tech reported that topics such as research policy and housing were also typical. But Osiris was in decline. That March, Gray had discovered that 34 people were
Answered “yes” to the March 16th meeting, but only 27 had turned up and that the “active” (student members) outnumbered the “over thirty” by three.