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“I joined Osiris my first year at a full-group meeting at a gala 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 a tuxedo [and] a senior member of the Society blindfolded them and drove them around for a while, ending up at the Club where they were confronted by a large group of faculty members and students.” (A written account of initiations from the 1960s says that tuxedoed initiates were usually told to perform stunts—like flying paper airplanes in front of the ticket counter at Logan—while waiting to be picked up.) While there were two annual meetings held in club, Burns says faculty members usually hosted regular dinner parties, many at Killian’s penthouse suite at 100 Memorial Drive. The student members were responsible for choosing the topics and leading the discussions, he says, and selected the attendees for the following year.
Of course, inviting many successive editors of MIT’s student newspaper to join a society with such a secret purpose was inherently risky. Of course, 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 newspaper articles at the time, but Stephen N. Cohen ’56, then editor The Techappears in the list of Osiris members. (Significantly, the next three editors — John A. Friedman ’57, Leland E. Holloway Jr. ’58, and Stewart Wade Wilson ’59 — did not.) A week later, Eldon H. Reiley ’55, president of MIT’s Undergraduate Association , chairman of the Institute’s committee and a member of Osiris, released an 11-paragraph statement in the The Tech saying, among other things, that “Osiris is an informal group of faculty and students who meet over dinner from time to time and discuss matters relating to the welfare and improvement of MIT. A group by itself has no power.”
Reiley wrote the truth: Nowhere in the archives or in interviews with surviving members is there any indication that the student members of Osiris had decided on anything other than the names of next year’s recruits.
Howard Wesley Johnson was inducted as an honorary fellow in 1965, shortly before he became MIT’s 12th president in 1966. Johnson apparently took his Osiris duties seriously: the meetings were entered in his appointment book, and when he missed an initiation in 1968, he wrote “to the OSIRIS people,” apologizing that “the work of defending MIT necessitated my absence.”
Johnson’s letter hints at the forces that finally brought the organization to an end: Osiris was a relic of the past—it had no female members until 1969, for example—and MIT was under attack in the present.
“I was added 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 amazing it was for students and faculty/administrators to meet and talk informally the way they did at Osiris meetings.”
TECHNIQUE 1904
Today, Howard Johnson’s presidency is remembered for his skillful 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. Documentary Actions in November includes film from the meetings of a joint committee of professors and students who helped calm the situation. Although many students were members of Osiris, they were present because they were chosen as student leaders, not because they belonged to a secret society. But Sirbu suggests that the Osiris meetings might explain why those in the room felt so comfortable with each other.
Handwritten minutes from two meetings in the spring of 1971 reveal that topics discussed included marijuana, civility at Osiris meetings, and the possible resurgence of McCarthyism on campus. Article in The Tech he reported that topics such as research and housing policy were also typical. But Osiris was in decline. That March, Gray noted that 34 people had done so
He said “yes” to the March 16 meeting, but only 27 showed up—and these ‘active’ (student members) outnumbered the ‘over-thirties’ by about three to one.
