ex-students and cat torture

Ban all oldbies once they stop being students.
It might break the cycle, but it's a STUPID idea,

Still, one day we might reach the point where ex-students outnumber current
students, and then it'll be time for a change.

-----Original Message-----
From:Nick Waterman [SMTP:nick-sony@]
Sent:22 March 2001 15:40
To:chat@
Subject:Re: ex-students and cat torture

"Thomas, Dominic" wrote:
current
In theory, there would be more ex-students than students within 3 or 4
years of IFIS's formation. In practice, very few members are even
"active" members, and very few "active" members hang around after uni,
and quite a few of them also drift off sooner or later, either moving to
other parts of the world, or finding other things to do with their
thursday evenings.

Remembering when I was a student, and remembering a few recent thursday
evenings, I'd say the ratio of students per ex-student is probably
rising, not falling. If trends continued this way, then there's
certainly no risk whatsoever of ex-students taking over the society, in
fact they'd end up completely excluded, and the students would probably
continue going in a 5-year cycle, possibly only a 2-or-3-year-cycle,
only they'd be nobody to TELL them they're doing it any more :-)

Anyone remember the monty python (?) sketch that ends "And you tell
young people today, and they don't believe you!"? I remember when I was
chair, and one of the studen/ex-student splits happenned, and one of the
infinite number of Chrises told me "Oh don't worry, it happens every
year or 2, it'll sort itself out", and I didn't know whether to believe
him. That was 8 or 9 years ago. I've seen it happen at least 3 times
since. I'm not saying there's one happenning now - as far as I can tell,
the current fiasco is just the SU being ridiculous yet again, but that's
something that *IS* getting worse. IFIS may be going round and round in
circles, but the SU isn't, it's getting worse and worse. They stop
allowing our fun piss-take constitutions, they make us get a sensible
one, they make us get another sensible one, they make us hold a
dubiously unconstitutional EGM to get YET ANOTHER sensible one, in the
meantime, they remove ex-student's rights, they remove student's rights,
they remove more ex-students rights, they decide they need to "oversee"
our AGMs to make sure we're not having fun or anything, and usually year
after year they give us pittiful theorics, 20 quid, 10 quid, 5 quid,
even ZERO, whilst sometimes throwing sporting clubs 4-or-5-figure
ammounts. Some university SF societies can afford to invite
internationally reknowned authors, and get them. Some SUs treat their SF
societies more seriously than their international tiddlywinks team.

Two students might have been going through university at roughly the
same time. One of them was probably a member of his Science Fiction
Society, one of them was probably a member of his Soccer Club. Certainly
both of them became very famous in these fields afterwards. Both of them
have since been knighted. One of them was Arthur C Clarke, one of them
was Stanley Rous. Who has the most recognisable name now? A Websearch
returned 276,000 hits for one and 2,260 for the other, want to guess
which is which? Who would you imagine has donated more money back into
education? Now... who, do you imagine, was taken most seriously by his
SU? What if they'd been at RHUL? :-)

--
Nick Waterman. IFIS Information Superhypewayman and whinge-bot.
mailto:nick-sig@ http://www.nilex.co.uk/~nick/
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