One thing that’s always fas­cin­ated me about organic brains — in con­trast to elec­tronic equip­ment — is that they never crash in the same way. Or per­haps they’re crash­ing all the time and there’s enough redund­ancy to hide it away: it’s hard to tell.

Most elec­tron­ics are stable and reli­able for a good while, but once they start to fail they gen­er­ally don’t fail out­right. A wire or sol­der­ing point will start to come a little bit loose. Sud­denly your device doesn’t work when it’s too hot (or too cold) or it’ll stop work­ing until you give it a good bang or blow out some dust, or some­times you have to try turn­ing it on mul­tiple times before it turns on for good. Machines often don’t reach a sud­den death like organic brains do, where one second they’re “alive” and the next second they’re “dead” and there’s no hope of them com­ing back again (ignor­ing the fact that there’s always ample oppor­tun­ity to repair them).

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In my pos­i­tion as chair of SOGS’ Bylaws and Con­sti­tu­tion Com­mit­tee, I was just given an archival pack­age of old doc­u­ments, mostly bylaws, by our old chair, Rebecca Feld­man. In that pack­age was a rather lovely essay on the early his­tory of SOGS. I had it scanned and ran it through an OCR sys­tem and cleaned up a couple OCR mis­takes so that I can put it online for every­one to see.

We were talk­ing about it and it would be really nice to extend this essay. I don’t know what the going rate for his­tory stu­dents in these days, but it would be awe­some to com­mis­sion another essay on SOGS’ his­tory from, say, 1980 to 1995.

Without fur­ther ado, here is the essay. It is entitled “The Soci­able Years: The Soci­ety of Gradu­ate Stu­dents, 1964 – 1979″ and is writ­ten by Daryl White. Daryl White is our former VP Fin­ance and unsur­pris­ingly was a his­tory major. It was obvi­ously writ­ten in Microsoft Word and I’ve done my best to clean up some of Word’s eye-​​bleedingly bad typo­graphy (okay, I’m just a snob).

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