The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

Considering the reaction by the world’s governments to the most recent Wikileaks leak, I may have to reconsider Freenet’s role a little bit.

I intended to run OpenSolaris on it because I quite like the technologies in OpenSolaris. Unfortunately OpenSolaris’s hardware support is very poor, but the laptop I bought looked like it had the highest chances of working, and it was very highly rated by Consumer Reports as well. After trying various OpenSolaris distributions and developer builds, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not going to work, at least not yet. It was probably naïve of me to think I could get my wireless card working under OpenSolaris.

No matter, though! My back-up plan was to run Linux. The last time I ran GNU/Linux as my primary operating system was in 2004. I ran Slackware with a custom built window manager and custom, well, everything, and I stayed willfully ignorant of what was happening with “mainstream” Linux. When it came time to install Linux on this laptop, I went with Ubuntu—as mainstream a Linux distribution as you can get—just because I wanted DVD burning software immediately so I could try yet another OpenSolaris install CD, and Ubuntu seemed like it would have the quickest install time.

I think I’m going to stick with Ubuntu. Setting up everything was so mind-blowingly painless it hardly even feels like Linux anymore. I’m perversely a little mournful about that. I dare say Ubuntu is easier to use (for me) and easier to set up (for me) than OS X is. Wireless, email, instant messaging, Flash, Dropbox, all my development tools, everything is cohesive and is set up in a matter of seconds; it all feels immediately comfortable. Even ZFS, my one source of geek pride, my one deviation from “mainstream” Linux, the one reason I wanted to install OpenSolaris in the first place: set up in a couple seconds and working flawlessly, and still light-years beyond OS X’s Time Machine. Maybe Ubuntu isn’t easier than OS X for the general public, but I’m not the general public so that doesn’t matter much to me.

The plan is to eventually retire the MacBook and turn it into a full-time media player (it’s currently only a part-time media player). I don’t think it’s going to be too long before Ubuntu is my full-time operating system. I never thought I’d say that.

About two years after that, I installed Slackware Linux. It was the first Unix I’d ever used and, consequently, the only logical operating system I’d used up to that point. I fell in love with it immediately. Unix itself was fun, but the fact that the source code was available for everything and I could tinker with everything was a big draw. I fell in love with free software almost as quickly as I fell in love with Unix.

I spent the end of my high school days and all of my undergraduate days with Slackware, making little contributions to free software projects here and there where I found the time. I also read Slashdot regularly, the homeland for self-loathing insecure nerds. The Slashdotters loved Linux and free software as much as I did and thus, because they were so self-loathing, they spent most of their time talking about how terrible Linux and free software were. Free software was unrealistically utopian, was never going to succeed, no real people would ever care about it, it was only for nerdy basement dwellers who had no concept of the real world, and so on.

I actually believed a lot of it, but I didn’t really care. I never thought free software would ever catch on in a serious way and thought Linux would never be more than a hobby OS, but I kept with it foremost because I personally enjoyed it and also because contributing to a communal effort just felt like the Right thing to do. It’s probably especially good to do the Right thing when you’re that age because it’s the easiest time to do it.

Imagine my surprise 10+ years later finding that non-nerdy people, people who have no attachment or fondness for software or computers, can name Tux as the Linux mascot. Windows is still dominant, of course, but Linux is part of the mainstream world, and free software runs the world, particularly through web services. The xkcd comic is a nice reminder that the world still benefits from doing the Right thing, maybe not right away or even in the foreseeable future, but eventually. Kids are much better than adults at picking up new things, picking up what’s right, what makes sense and what’s garbage. I think a big part of where we are now is due to the fact that so many kids were exposed to Linux (even if just in name) when they were young and, as they grew up and entered the working world, they decided to make Linux and its values part of our world.

The first sentence of one of his most recent blog posts just hit me like a brick:

The reason I like the future is because you can change it.

That sums up a lot about me and why I get so frustrated with friends my age—or usually quite a bit younger!—who are already starting to slip into the conservative “things which are new suck” mentality. It might take me a bit of extra effort to “get” some of the new changes to the world: Twitter is a good example. It would be easy for me to stick to how things were and shake my cane and say “in my day, we wrote blog posts with more than 140 characters!” but I think in the end it’s worth it.

I’m pretty psyched about the future and I want to be a part of it and, I guess most importantly, I want to change it.

I’ve been watching it for the past 3 or 4 years. Whoever owns it doesn’t appear to be using it for a whole lot—probably just email if anything—and it definitely doesn’t seem to be a domain squatter. I was starting to think it was someone who registered the domain and forgot about it. When they forgot to renew the domain last month I figured it was finally going to be released.

Last night—the date the domain expired—I checked it and it was listed by CIRA as SUSPD. I.e., it had entered the 30-day “suspended” period where the owner has one final chance to renew before it’s released. I think CIRA charges a penalty for renewing a domain while it’s suspended, so whoever owns this domain apparently really wants it for something. I guess I can’t be too upset about it. Oh well.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only visible, change is in performance. I haven’t dug into seeing what they’ve done to help things, but most freesites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impressive compared to the WWW, but it’s really impressive considering the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource consumption standpoint, performance is still quite terrible. I’ve been running it for close to a day now and the load average stays somewhere around 0.3 even when not doing anything and can jump up above 3.0 when doing casual browsing of freesites or Frost boards. This is unfortunate since you have to leave it running 24/7 for it to work well.

The same problem is with Freenet that has always been there: content. I agree with the general philosophies of Freenet: even “good” censorship philosophically has bad consequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of censorship. Well, in practice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any compelling content. I’ve poked around the major freesites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost message boards and…nothing. There’s piles of content, of course, but little of it of consequence, very little of it interesting, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of something like Freenet in mostly-free countries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that—for instance there’s a freesite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails—but the fact of the matter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” censorable Internet and it hasn’t been censored. Or at least not yet. There’s been posturing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche market for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the freesites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actually does make sense. The Internet is becoming less and less anonymous. It used to be that you could set up a Geocities sites and write about your love for Emma Goldman, but these days service providers (in the most general sense) are chomping at the bit jumping all over themselves at the opportunity of passing on IP addresses and whatnot. The political writings on Freenet aren’t generally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few countries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the exceptions), but they’re unconventional enough that I can see people wanting anonymity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensorable as it is about Freenet offering this very elegant pseudonymity. I suppose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the theory of Freenet and I still acknowledge its practical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to create a freesite to add more content and get more people interested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of anything compelling to put there. I think I’ll just uninstall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsolesced by a new Freenet message board system called FMS. When I’d previously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actually rather fantastic (and it works with your existing newsgroup reader like Thunderbird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the content on there is going to be radically different from the rest of Freenet.

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).

I had a dream last night where one of my friends was like this. I can’t remember how the dream started, but he had some illness, some virus or something, and within a couple days he died.

But then he was alive again. For about a day, and then he died again. From what I can tell, he died whenever he shifted his focus from one thing to another. For instance, we were all in a van he was driving—in retrospect it probably wasn’t the wisest idea to give the driving responsibilities to a person who has a habit of dying—and the second he put the van into park and shut off the ignition, he was gone. It was like as soon as he finished that task and had to think about what was coming next, his brain froze up and suddenly forgot to keep his heart beating and his lungs breathing.

The good news is once he cooled down a bit more he rebooted and came back to life.

I wanted to talk to him and his wife about the psychological implications of this. Not just “what is it like to have come back from the dead?” but also “what is it like to know your brain isn’t reliable? To know that it flickers back and forth between working and non-working like an old NES cartridge?” but I never got the chance. His wife seemed to carry the idea that he was going to get repaired soon, that this was a temporary state.

This tone of looking at him like a machine isn’t just in retrospect; I thought like that during the dream, and honestly I think about people like that an awful lot. Life is unreliable in a lot of ways: our organs stop working; we lose consciousness; sometimes we even go into vegetative states. We never go into this “flickering” state, though, of sometimes we work and sometimes we don’t. It’s always fascinated me as to why.

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).

The Sociable Years

The Society of Graduate Students, 1964–1979

By Daryl White

The lack of institutional memory is one of the fundamental weaknesses in student government. Our executive only serves one or two years and our entire membership turns over with great frequency, though not as frequently as the Faculty of Graduate Studies would like. To this end, I have undertaken a history of the Society of Graduate Students. I hope that by giving SOGS a coherent past, it can make better decisions for its future.

Sailboats and Summer Homes, SOGS in the 1960s

Although by the 1960s there had been graduate students at Western for several decades and the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FGS) had been founded in 1947, graduate students apparently lacked a sense of larger identity. Grads continued to be organized as part of the University Students’ Council (USC). In the fall of 1962, Frank Anglin, a geology grad student, sent out a message inviting grad students to attend an informal social evening. A strong turnout (exact numbers are unrecorded), led a group of four to start a graduate organization. Dean Allen of the Faculty of Graduate Studies donated some office space and that winter, questionnaires were sent out to the graduate student population. A majority replied that they favoured the establishment of a graduate student organization. At fall registration in 1963 (this is a time when students still registered in person for courses), membership cards for the Council of Graduate Students were sold for $3 each.

To give the group a more formal structure, a constitution was drafted. The University Board of Governors accepted the draft in 1964 and the Council now formally represented the interests of graduate students. Over the next year, the constitution was tinkered with and the Council was changed to become the Society of Graduate Students.

At the Society’s general meeting that November, President Frank Anglin presided over representatives from fourteen graduate programs. A number of suggestions for SOGS activities were put forward. One representative suggested that a small loan fund be established to allow graduate students temporarily short of cash to borrow enough to tide them over until payday. Although rejected at the time, the same suggestion in the late 1970s led to the creation of SOGS’ emergency loan program, which still helps dozens of students in cash crunches today. A suggestion that the university adopt a special tie for graduate students, was better received, but not acted upon.

By 1967, the SOGS treasurer reported that there were 1,113 full-time grads at Western and that 791 were SOGS members. New programs were looked at. President Jesse Craft investigated the possibility of a legal representative for the Society, who would be available to advise members with legal questions. In 1968, membership had grown sufficiently that the Society discontinued its secretarial services with the USC and hired Mrs. Gail Woodhouse as the first SOGS secretary. At the close of the decade, there were discussions surrounding the openness of SOGS meetings and the potential problems with reporters attending meetings. This was not merely fanciful as London Free Press reporters periodically attended SOGS meetings. There was also discussion around the acronym SOGS. It was suggested that SOGS had unfavourable connotations and that the Society should use the acronym SGS. This was eventually rejected.

However, SOGS’ first few years were not fully without controversy. Only two years after SOGS came into existence, President Chuck McFadden submitted his resignation to the Council because he felt there was excessive friction between himself and the Councillors. Council passed a motion requesting that he stay and pledging better cooperation and McFadden withdrew his resignation. A few years later, a second President would resign for much the same reason. His protest against Council’s refusal to empower the Executive prompted much the same reaction and Council again refused to accept the resignation.

In response to the Society’s position on the University’s disciplinary code, a position which favoured a paternal university, graduate students in political science moved to disassociate themselves with SOGS. Armed with the authority granted it by the Board of Governors and critical of the failure of the Political Science students to participate in the SOGS meetings where the position was adopted, SOGS refused to allow them to leave (the only group which has ever left SOGS are the Business Administration PhD students in the 1980s).

Although the political activities of the Society occupied a great deal of the Executive’s time, the true focus of the Society was on social activities. This for years remained one of the cornerstones of SOGS operations and only began to change in the late 1980s. Before it even held the November 1964 general meeting, SOGS was already in the habit of organizing a party each month in the fall and winter terms. It was noted that with an overwhelmingly male graduate student population, there needed to be more advertising of the dances for the women on campus. Dances, picnics, and parties would continue to be frequent events for SOGS.

Within the first few years of SOGS operations, a concert committee was formed and received the current equivalent of $3,000 per year to bring in performers. Unfortunately, the committee failed in their efforts to obtain Glen Gould.

There was a continuing interest in sponsoring athletic facilities for grads. The Athletic Committee was one of the earliest formed by SOGS. It organized hockey teams and baseball leagues. It also made frequent recommendations to purchase equipment for the membership. Thus SOGS purchased squash racquets, soccer balls, hockey sticks and other paraphernalia, which were left in Thames Hall and at other campus facilities for member use. Several hundred dollars a year was routinely spent on such activities. The Cultural Committee, charged with enriching the graduate student experience at Western organized trips to Stratford, to plays in Toronto, and ran an Opera Workshop. However, it was noted that trips to the Labatt Brewery and Maple Leafs games were also organized “for the less highbrow.” SOGS even purchased a number of prints from a local artist, and apparently loaned them to the McIntosh Gallery; two of these pieces were returned to SOGS in 2002.

The largely male membership also gave rise to a Graduate Student Wives committee, which by 1968 numbered 55. Its activities included a book discussion group, a bridge club, a gourmet club, handicrafts, needlework, sports, and running a babysitting co-op.

At that first general meeting in 1964, SOGS began to discuss the establishment of a graduate centre. For the better part of a decade, this remained one of the key goals of the organization. It envisioned a facility which combined a graduate student lounge, the SOGS offices, and a graduate student dining room/pub. These facilities would be exclusively for the use of graduate students.

By the spring of 1966, SOGS had with the help of the Faculty of Graduate Studies obtained space for a central grad lounge in Somerville House, the same building where the graduate dining room was located. The Lounge Committee took out subscriptions to a number of periodicals including Canadian Geographic, The New Republic, The Financial Post, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy. In response to criticism that SOGS’ reading material was too pro-American in its politics, it was noted that there was a range of material and that in fact Playboy rather than The New Republic, was the most popular.

The roots of the Grad Club are evident in the Happy Hour operation started in 1968. It ran 3–6pm on Fridays in the Graduate Dining Room. Average attendance for the first three weeks was 85 people. However, undergraduate influx was a problem and a ‘grads only’ rule was imposed.

Indicative of the belief that SOGS role was primarily social were two proposals. The first, was that SOGS should purchase a pair of sailboats for use on Lake Fanshawe. At a time when the SOGS budget was approximately $3,000, a suggestion to use one-third of the budget for two sailboats was greeted with some skepticism. It was felt that too few students would make use of the boats to justify the expense.

Far more seriously considered was the notion of a SOGS summer home. Former President Jesse Craft proposed to rent a cottage in the Wildwood Conservation Area for approximately $1,200. The proposal was approved by an overwhelming vote of 13 to 3. The suggestion was that the house would be available for graduate students to picnic, boat, and hold parties. In the end, the Wildwood space could not be obtained and further sites were to be investigated. However, it seems that SOGS never pursued this.

One of the most important functions of SOGS has always been representing graduate student interests in the University community. It was a task to which the Society set itself very shortly after formation.

One of the reasons for rejecting the emergency loan program in 1964 was a belief that the cause of the problem rather than the symptom needed to be addressed. In 1966, SOGS undertook a needs and means survey and concluded that for single students attending UWO for 12 months, a level of support of $3,000 was needed. Interestingly, adjusted for inflation $3,000 is approximately $17,500, or roughly what FGS has today set as the guaranteed minimum funding for PhDs. Of course, tuition was only one-sixth of the amount in 1966 and is closer to one-third today. SOGS lobbied Department Chairs, Deans, and the senior administration in an effort to have them endorse the recommended minimum support levels, but was unsuccessful.

SOGS also lobbied the administration regarding international students. It suggested that a full-time international student advisor should be employed to help with orientation and assist with instruction in English.

The big issue on campus in the 1960s was parking, with park-ins on core campus being staged. For its part SOGS spent a good deal of time on the issue. Its parking committee reviewed several proposals from the University and concentrated on the issues of access for grads to parking, particularly privileged parking compared to undergraduate students, less draconian enforcement, and reasonable fees.

SOGS worked very closely with the Faculty of Graduate Studies. In what is a curiosity for most of us today, the Dean of the Faculty was the honorary president of the Society. When Dean Rossiter retired, the Society gave him a soapstone carving, which he apparently named “Guby.” A Grad-Faculty committee regularly discussed graduate student issues, such as taxation on demonstratorships and teaching fellowships, heavy work loads on grads in psychology, liquor licenses for the grad student lounge, health and medical insurance, parking, and examination fees for PhD candidates. It seems that the Faculty’s relationship to graduate students was much broader than it is today. FGS was greatly helpful in securing the grad lounge on campus and was regularly consulted by SOGS on issues outside the Faculty’s own purview.

Towards the end of the 1960s, the question of the University Community Centre came to occupy a particular prominence in student government at Western. The USC strongly favoured a student union building which would provide space for all student groups. SOGS, for its part, was initially opposed to the UCC, because it eclipsed another project which SOGS had advocated: a graduate college, in which the Faculty of Graduate Studies, SOGS, and graduate students could interact regularly (the SOGS President referred to the opportunity to see “the Dean and his minions”). When the University Senate chose to proceed with the University Community Centre, SOGS remained hopeful that a distinct graduate student centre could be included in the building. SOGS had particular objections to the USC’s vision, which it believed was designed to create a building dominated by undergraduate students. For its part, the USC opposed SOGS suggestion of separate graduate facilities.

As it became increasingly apparent that SOGS would not be able to obtain separate graduate facilities in the UCC, alternatives were explored. The Silverwood Building near King’s college, which was in the process of being vacated by the Faculty of Music, was discussed. Another option was an expansion of Somerville House, which SOGS would pay for. As any proposal would involve considerable expense, when the University decided to proceed with the UCC, SOGS held a referendum to increase student fees by $12 per year, with $4 going to the UCC and $8 held in reserve for graduate student facilities. When the referendum failed to meet its quorum requirement, a second referendum was held without a quorum and the fee was imposed.

Although primarily a social conduit and an interest group, SOGS also took an active interest in graduate student academic activities. Grants were made to the Philosophy Department’s Hemlock Society, to the Geology Department’s Outcrop Club, and other campus organizations to help bring in prominent speakers. Today, the Society offers travel subsidies to graduate students attending conferences and this has been a part of SOGS from the beginning. Graduate students traveling to conferences routinely submitted requests for funds. The process was not anonymous as it is today and open votes were taken on whether to grant the requests. Still, few were turned away.

Very early on SOGS took an active interest in organizing conferences. The theme of Colloquium ’67 was “Processes of Social Change,” and featured panels on Marxist-Christian dialogue, Automation Labour, and Social Change, and Students of Social Change. Given the relative size of the organizations, it is striking that SOGS spent more than double on Colloquium ’67 than it currently spends on the Western Research Forum. The colloquia were not without controversy. President McFadden was censured by Council for writing to the Soviet embassy and suggesting that they would be invited to the next year’s colloquium.

Even in its early years, SOGS looked beyond the confines of the Western Campus. In the spring of 1967, SOGS worked to help establish the Canadian Union of Graduate Students with Toronto, Waterloo and McMaster. Later on, the SOGS President would travel out west to meet with graduate student presidents to press for a national meeting of graduate students.

Locally, SOGS lobbied the City Council to maintain the trial bus service along Western Road in 1969. SOGS also established a Graduate Students Speakers Bureau to coordinate requests from local high school teachers and sent graduate students to speak on a variety of topics.

Local action also took the form of grants to organizations such as Pollution Probe to help them conduct their work. The Society took an interest in public policy and responded to several government proposals that affected graduate students. If there is one constant in SOGS in the 1960s, it is an apathy on the part of the membership. In 1970, President Greg Lucier tendered his resignation, stating that

I believe that there are basic differences between graduate and undergraduate students which are significant enough to warrant a separate form of student government for graduates. However, the majority of graduate students on this campus have demonstrated a lack of interest not only in the Society which represents graduate life but in the very issues which affect graduate life. This is exemplified by their failure to take any active part in the Society other than patronizing ‘Happy Hour.’

Nevertheless, at the end of the 1960s, SOGS reflected back on its accomplishments and asserted that it had been a success. Happy Hour had been established and SOGS was participating in the planning of the UCC. It had produced a newsletter, had conducted a housing survey, had improved graduate representation with FGS, and had organized a number of highly successful social activities.

The Grad Club and the World Beyond, SOGS in the 1970s

The Society of Graduate Students entered the 1970s with six successful years behind it, but still there were doubts about the viability of the organization. At the April, 1970 Council meeting, the retiring First Vice-President moved that “because of the obvious apathy rampant amongst the 1,145 graduate students, out of a total of 1,200 enrolled at UWO,” “the Society of Graduate Students at UWO dissolve as a formal organization].” The discussion of the motion revolved around the right of Council to call itself representative. The organization that spoke on behalf of 1,200 was being run by a very small group. Ultimately, the motion was tabled and forgotten, but it came on the heels of President Greg Lucier’s resignation and these two events portended ill for SOGS in the coming decade.

This problem was exacerbated by a declining enrollment in the early 1970s. With diminishing revenues, the SOGS executive was compelled to let the SOGS Secretary, Gail Woodhouse, go. As a result, the SOGS office hours were reduced to eight hours per week. A few years later, SOGS would strike a Committee on the Allocation of Society Funds to discuss priorities for its reduced expenditures. In its report, the Committee highlighted social events as the key activities meriting SOGS sponsorship. Also prominent in their report were support for students attending conferences and capital expenditures for graduate student facilities.

One of the greatest strides in graduate student organization in the 1970s was the development of the Society’s departmental grant program. In September, 1974, the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) Student Council announced that it was leaving SOGS to join the USC. The students felt that as they did not have major research programs and did not receive support for their tuition and expenses they had little in common with the majority of SOGS members. Both SOGS and the Faculty of Graduate Studies were concerned that if the SLIS students switched to the USC, it would result in a breakup of the system of student organization within the graduate Faculty. The students were persuaded to present their reasons to the SOGS Council before making a unilateral withdrawal.

That presentation concentrated on the students’ main concern, which was a permanent supply of money for the SLIS council. In response, the SOGS Council proposed to return 50% of the fees received from SLIS students back to the SLIS council. Over the next few months, a series of motions were passed creating the departmental grant system. Eventually, the grant was set at $1.50¹ per full-time graduate student registered in the department, subject to the department being represented at 75% of the SOGS Council meetings held in the previous two terms. The grants were not automatic. Departmental organizations had to apply for them. Moreover, organizations were required to demonstrate their existence by presenting a signed list of members of the organization who attended the meeting which approved the application for funds from SOGS.

At the same time as SOGS strengthened its internal ties, it continued in its efforts to engage the world off campus. The most significant effort in this regard was SOGS’ role in the formation of a national graduate student organization. In 1970, SOGS organized a Graduate Students’ National Meeting. The cost of $3,300 was recouped through registration fees and a generous $1,750 grant from the University. The meeting discussed research, publication, course work, teaching, exams, graduate financing, taxation, and stipends and included a session on graduate-undergraduate relations and graduate obligations to society.

Following this initial meeting, Colin Baynes presented the SOGS Council with a proposal to administer a Canadian Conference of Graduate Students. Annual operating expenses were assumed to be $15,000 and Baynes presented a scheme of graduate contributions designed not to unduly burden smaller organizations. The motivation for Baynes’ proposal is unclear. SOGS had played a role in the earlier establishment of the Canadian Union of Graduate Students, which by all appearances still existed.

Also in 1972 came one of the boldest suggestions in the history of SOGS. A new proposal for funding graduate students was presented at the July Council meeting. Under the plan, graduate tuition would reflect the actual cost of offering the program. The government would in turn budget funds to support graduate students. A new body called the Ontario Graduate Admissions Board would divide these available funds among the various disciplines and would review student applications and award scholarships to the top applicants. These scholarships would consist of a maintenance grant and tuition fees with annual eligibility subject to review. These scholarship holders would then seek registration at the university and with the supervisor of their choice. International students would be limited to 30% of the total number of scholarships. Scholarship holders could also be required to perform teaching or research duties outside of their normal
academic requirements for up to ten hours per week without additional pay. The benefits, it was suggested, would be that all graduate students would have sufficient income to cover their living expenses. The number of graduate students and programs would decrease, but the quality, it was believed, would greatly improve. There is no indication that anything ever came of this striking proposal.

SOGS also devoted time to exploring the role of graduate student as worker. President Arthur reported that as of January 1, 1979, graduate students were no longer eligible for unemployment insurance as a minimum requirement of twenty hours of work per week had been imposed. On the brighter side, the President was able to confirm that teaching and research assistants were covered by the Workmen’s Compensation Act while working for the university. This capped a lengthy investigation into the hazards of university employment and the potential risks for graduate students.

By the late 1970s, it seemed that the earlier graduate student organization had collapsed and SOGS was entertaining the idea of joining the National Union of Students (NUS) and the Ontario Federation of Students (OFS). In October, 1978, a referendum was held, with a turnout of 10%. Although a majority had voted in favour of joining the NUS, Council rejected the results and moved to hold a second referendum in January. The turnout for the second referendum was substantially better (27%) with 80% in favour of joining NUS and 60% in favour of joining OFS. With this decision, SOGS ended the 1970s with a step towards membership in the broader national student community.

SOGS continued its active role in representing graduate students in the UWO community throughout the 1970s. The decade began with the Society working to provide daycare. In 1969, when the Western Day Care Centre found itself with $1,000 deficit, SOGS granted an interest-free loan of $250 to help balance the books. At the February, 1970 council meeting, President Richard Wildeman informed those present that the UWO Day Care Centre continued to find itself in financial dire straits and was on the verge of collapse. Despite the fact that the Day Care Centre’s budget was presently double that of SOGS, Wildeman proposed that to ensure that the Day Care Centre survived, SOGS assume total responsibility for its operations.

By April, that arrangement was formalized. However, the SOGS Council also took precautions to ensure that the operation ran smoothly. The Executive’s suggestion that the Day Care should be run at arms’ length from SOGS was taken and a committee outside of SOGS was established to oversee the Day Care. The committee consisted of several senior administrators, members of the SOGS executive, a chartered accountant, and several graduate students. This committee ran the Day Care Centre for nearly two years before SOGS transferred responsibility for the Centre to Western Day Care Centre Limited on April 1, 1972.

1970 also saw the establishment of the Ad-Hoc Committee on SOGS/USC Relations. SOGS President Colin Baynes asserted that the cooperation between the two organizations had reached a “lamentably low level” and hoped to improve the situation. Four months later, the committee reported and made several recommendations. The first was the establishment of observers for both organizations on the other’s council. More dramatically, the committee recommended that SOGS merge with the USC and take on the role of a Faculty Council for the Faculty of Graduate Studies within the USC. The committee felt that by retaining a separate structure within the USC, SOGS could continue to address distinct graduate student issues while at the same time eliminating the “effects of the present divisive arrangement.”

Lobbying the administration was an ongoing activity during the decade and dealt with a variety of issues. SOGS argued for students to have a greater role in the discussion of faculty promotion and tenure. When the provincial government announced a standard graduate fee of $880 for 1972–3, SOGS met with the University to secure assurances that if any fee was charged for the third term, a bursary would be issued to all graduate students to cover it. SOGS took issue with the suggestion that time limits for degree completion be implemented and strongly protested the bicycle regulations imposed by the Board of Governors. In a dramatic reversal of its earlier support for a paternal university and student disciplinary code, the SOGS Council completely rejected the idea of including graduate students in the provisions of the code and refused to appoint a graduate student magistrate to assist in its implementation. The Council even asked the Treasurer to investigate the possibility of a fund to pay the contempt of court fines for graduate students refusing to recognize the code.

One of the more unusual points of friction with the University was SOGS’ response to a “pro-apartheid rally” held on campus in October, 1978. The SOGS minutes record that the rally was advertised as a forum on Apartheid and included two speakers funded by “the illegal Rhodesian government.” SOGS took particular issue with the role of faculty member Kenneth Hilborn who presided over the event. It was suggested that Hilborn’s previous actions along with his role in this rally, “brought disrepute to the University” and Council was asked to consider action to show disapproval. At the next Council meeting, it was moved to withdraw representatives from any university committee on which Hilborn sat. The motion was defeated by a vote of 19 to 12. Council accepted the less drastic measure of drafting a letter expressing the concerns of the Society and protesting his membership on the Social Sciences Division Committee.

As the Allocation Committee had determined, the priority of SOGS in the 1970s continued to be social events. For the outgoing, SOGS organized day hikes, canoe trips and a trip to Flowerpot Island for the 1974 Civic Holiday weekend. However, none of these events was well attended and a proposed car rally was called off for lack of interest. Much more successful were the SOGS dances, which were more sporadic than in previous years, but continued to attract good crowds.

Unquestionably, the centerpiece of SOGS’ social role was the operation of Happy Hour. Unfortunately, Happy Hour did not begin the decade well. Following the recommendations of SOGS’ auditors, accounting records began to be kept, cash reconciliations made and a dual-signature system for cheques was implemented. Unfortunately, these new controls did not help Happy Hour avoid a $1,200 loss in 1972. Insufficient controls in other areas manifested themselves in the reports of “drunken graduate students accosting visitors to the University attending functions in the Great Hall.”

Happy Hour’s problems continued to mount and it was temporarily suspended in 1973. After a loss of $600 on $879 in revenue in June and July of 1974, Treasurer J.W. Coulton reported that Happy Hour would cease to function as of September. However, graduate students rallied behind Happy Hour and it was reinstated in October. By 1976, the operation had completely turned around and Happy Hour reported $1,600 in assets entirely derived from the last year’s profits. The overwhelming success led to Happy Hour becoming a daily operation in February, 1977. Although Monday to Thursday continued to be held in UCC 259, the popularity of Friday afternoons led to the search for larger venues and it was moved to the Middlesex College Terrace Room, the site of the present Grad Club.

The renewed interest in Happy Hour also spawned a search for a Graduate House on campus. This idea had been previously discussed in connection with the construction of the UCC, but now the University seemed to take an interest in the project. An ad hoc committee was formed by the Senate Committee on University Development to investigate space for a grad house. By late 1977, a School of Library and Information Sciences decision not to use the Middlesex Cafeteria led the University to grant the space to SOGS. A referendum was organized to request a $15 per student annual fee to help finance the renovations proposed by what had come to be known as the “SOGS Alcoholism Committee.” The space would be partitioned into a television room, a reading room and a pub. Food Services would maintain a small servery near the area. Campus music icon Rick McGhie was hired as a consultant for the sound system. In March, 1979, over five hundred graduate students voted overwhelmingly in favour of the fee to renovate the Grad Centre (because of liquor license issues, the name “Grad Club” could not be used).

The establishment of the Grad Club/Centre was unquestionably the outstanding achievement of SOGS in the 1970s. The operation would continue to play a pivotal role in SOGS and provide a desperately needed social outlet for graduate students, faculty, and staff on campus. SOGS continued to grapple with student apathy, but the creation of the departmental grant system would help foster local organizations in the years to come. At Western, SOGS’ lobbying with the administration seemed to produce few concrete results, but Wildeman’s bold gamble on Western Day Care helped sustain a service vital to graduate students. Still, there must have been those who felt that SOGS’ support of the University Community Centre was its coup de grace. The flowery prose of the Terms of Reference for the University Community Centre Directorate declared that “the ideal of all members of a community working collectively towards a single goal is an ancient one. If, in the end result, one of man’s major purposes is peaceful co-operation and co-existence, then all efforts to aid that purpose must be supported. The University Community Centre at Western is indeed one of those efforts.”

Conclusion

The first sixteen years of SOGS clearly suggest that a small and dedicated group of people, perhaps not unlike Lenin’s revolutionary elite, can achieve a great deal. From its humble origins in a 1964 social evening, the Society had grown to an incorporated body providing a range of services to its members including emergency loans and travel grants, as well as running an increasingly successful graduate student pub. Thousands of dollars had been raised and spent on conferences and support for academic activities on campus. The Society had lobbied tirelessly for graduate student interests in the construction of the UCC and in the policies of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Board of Governors. Beyond the campus, the Society had responded to several key reports of the Ontario government on the future of graduate study and had presented its own proposals for improvements. SOGS had also participated in the establishment and ongoing discussions of broader national and provincial student organizations. By the end of the 1970s, the modern form of SOGS is very much evident in the Society’s structure and operations. At the same time, the roots of SOGS as a sort of social club continued to be very strong and would continue to persist into the 1980s.

I briefly skimmed through other build system, cmake, SCons, even cabal, but for all the talk of simplification and portability, they don’t seem to offer enough over make to get rid of it. Maybe I’m too corrupted by the Unix way of doing things, but building software, for me, always boils down to a few shell commands with a bit of dependency handling, which is pretty much the definition of make. If a build system uses anything other than the shell as its “native language” I end up fighting with it.

On the portability side of things, I would probably look at this issue differently if I were building libraries instead of just executables and documentation, but I’ve never seen portability to Windows (for instance) as such a compelling win that it strikes me as a better solution than just installing cygwin.

The only instance I can see where using powers of 2 could possibly be beneficial is when referring exactly to the number of MMU pages or the number of file system blocks allocated for something, but in those instances I think I would rather say something like “7 pages” than “28k”.

And yes, this is inspired by repartitioning my hard drive and being annoyed at having to convert a number like 202691383296 bytes into gibibytes (base 2 gigabytes) because the tool stupidly won’t work with base 10 gigabytes. Sometimes I think people go out of their way to make things more arcane than they need to be.