How do we learn from the past when we don’t know anything about it? While historians ensure that the events of the past don’t fade into obscurity, that can be harder to do on a smaller scale. Institutional memory is a funny thing. That term refers to how an organization, that nebulous blob of people who are coming and going over the years, retains information about itself. The less time people spend in any given organization, the more holes in that institutional memory.
For a student newspaper like The Cascade, the lack of institutional memory is striking. Because we’re entirely run by students, most of us are only at the paper for a few years before graduating and never looking back. With every person that leaves, information about how (and just as importantly, why) things are done fades away, and hard-learned lessons are lost, leading to the same mistakes being made in the future. Beyond that, all the important journalism our many writers have done over the years is relegated to the archives. Without a doubt, the same issues arise in other student-run organizations like the Student Union Society or clubs and associations.
Over the past year, The Cascade has been trying to remedy this problem in a couple of ways. Our previous editor-in-chief (and the author of this issue’s feature), Andrea Sadowski, compiled a massive training manual bringing together about a decade’s worth of scattered “how-to” documents and succession reports, with the intention of future Cascade teams adding on to it and evolving it as they go.
But, as we say on the front of each issue, The Cascade has been around since 1993 — longer than many people on our current team have been alive. A lot of older work was never put online, and isn’t so easy to revisit. We have an archive room, but it’s only accessible when a member of The Cascade’s leadership is available to unlock the door.
To address that, we recently brought in our first-ever (as far as our institutional memory can recall) archivist. Admittedly, I’m biased, since he’s also my brother. Scott Mijo is a recent graduate of the Library and Information Technology program, and has been volunteering at The Cascade for the past year, digging through decades of old papers to organize and digitize our history. While it’s still a work in progress, hundreds of past issues are now available in beautiful, searchable PDF, reaching all the way back to 1993. You can take a look for yourself at issuu.com/the-cascade.
Taking these steps may seem like a pain at the time; an easy chore to put off until later. But if the Student Union Building ever burns down, we won’t lose decades worth of independent reporting. If the entire executive staff is fired in a massive scandal (fingers crossed that doesn’t happen), their replacements won’t have to start learning how to run this wild organization from scratch. Institutional memory is a nebulous concept, but it’s one we need to actively preserve.
Jeff was The Cascade's Editor in Chief for the latter half of 2022, having previously served as Digital Media Manager, Culture & Events Editor, and Opinion Editor. One time he held all three of those positions for a month, and he's not sure how he survived that. He started at The Cascade in 2016.
