Former Presidents
- 1971 – Emily Wallace was elected OUSRC president, the first president of Oxford students to be officially recognised by the University.
- 1973 – Michael Sullivan became the first sabbatical president of Oxford students and the first president of the renamed Oxford University Student Union.
- 1982 – John Grogan became the first president to succeed in obtaining a seat for students at the University's governing council, in June 1983. He and two other students chosen by OUSU became observers for most of the council's agenda, and this practice was enshrined in the University's Statutes, Decrees, and Regulations.
- 1993 – Akaash Maharaj became the first ever visible ethnic minority president and also the first president from overseas (Canada). He helped lead a successful national campaign that thwarted a 1994 government bill to restrict the ability of students' unions to comment on public policy issues and that contributed to the ultimate dismissal from Cabinet of the then Secretary of State for Education, John Patten.
- 1998 – Katherine Rainwood became the only known president to resign from office, leaving only days into her term of office after having been found by the University Proctors to have used "unfair means" during her Finals.
- 2003 – Will Straw carried out protests against the government's introduction of tuition fees for students, despite his father Jack Straw being a senior member of the government of the day. Before coming up to Oxford, Will Straw had made headlines for receiving a formal police caution for drug-dealing.
Read more about this topic: Oxford University Student Union
Famous quotes containing the word presidents:
“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumours of another Messiah.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)