Your first long vac at Oxford is a very educational experience. It teaches you which of your friends can be bothered to reply to your messages when you’re not in physical proximity to each other; how much of your pre-reading you can be bothered to do away from the city and its magical yet imposing libraries; and the lengths to which you will go to stay connected with your college community and the University at large.
The latter lesson was exemplified for me when I found myself reading my college chaplain’s history of the college chapel with rapt attention. It’s a short but informative study, grounded in published college histories and archival material. It made perfect sense in my mind that the person charged with looking after the chapel should be the author of its history. They, after all, know the place the best. It wasn’t long after reading it that I applied the same philosophy to my own role as the OxStu’s Editor-in-Chief, and decided to attempt to write a history of the paper.
There are three main reasons that I decided to begin this project: in its three decades of existence, nobody else had attempted to comprehensively document the paper’s history; I was personally interested in seeing how the paper had changed over time; and, particularly selfishly, I thought it would be very gratifying to see the project to completion and be the person to publish the first complete OxStu history.
As a History student with no plans of going into academia in the future, the project was not my attempt to set myself apart early in my degree as a committed historian able to complete research projects entirely unprompted. However, I did think it would probably be good practice for my dissertation in third year.
Beyond the reasons listed above, though, what’s the point in writing a history of The Oxford Student, or any student newspaper? Is it to provide adequate sources for a Wikipedia page that, since June 2022, has been flagged as requiring “additional citations for verification”? Is it to make myself and other editors, past, present, and future, feel as though what we contribute is worthy of marking in the historical record? Is it to provide an answer to Cherwell’s multiple in-depth explorations of its own, longer history? Is it to inflate my own ego as the OxStu’s self-appointed archivist?
The straight answer to all these questions is no, although they are undoubtedly tangled in the web of reasons that I saw the project to the end. Ultimately, writing history does not need a justification. We live in the epoch of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, where the government intentionally undersells the value of humanities courses to boost Britain’s performance in the STEM world. Under that light, it’s important to remember that universities are not factories for job opportunities and you should not have to study something because it’s the best route to future employment. History can be studied and written just because you’re interested in it.
I wrote the first full OxStu history because I wanted to, just as anybody else who wrote for or was interested in the paper in the past could have. If anyone did think to attempt something similar in the past, I can understand why they might have decided to leave it to someone else, having now completed my project.
I dangerously underestimated the amount of admin that would be involved in researching the history of the paper. Since it is owned by the Oxford SU, I figured that they would have most of the answers I needed in their records. What I had not factored in was that multiple office moves and frequent staff turnover meant that nobody in the SU seemed to know if those records even existed anymore, or if so, where they would be.
I was directed to the University Offices in Wellington Square and began an odyssey of emailing what felt like every department in the central University trying to figure out where the records might be. Most emails led to dead ends and the others looped back to the same people multiple times. I got to know the various departmental chains of command fairly well during those summer weeks where my hopes for any useful information were constantly being dashed.
Unable to find many answers through University records, I decided to spend a few weeks trawling the internet for any mention of the paper. I clicked through pages and pages of material on SOLO as well as a variety of newspaper archives. It was here that I began to despise the generic name of the paper – the amount of articles that merely referenced “an Oxford student” or “this Oxford student” rather than THE Oxford Student was very irritating.
At one point I became so desperate that I translated (or rather, Google translated) a Spanish article on the virtues of American and British student newspaper websites because there were three lines about the OxStu in it. Still, I did eventually manage to find quite a lot of coverage of the paper in major national publications, certainly more than I expected. There’s your justification, if you’re still looking for it.
Regardless of the success of my attempts to locate SU and online records, I always knew that the majority of my research would come from two sources that would require slightly less emailing – viewing the paper’s backlog of issues in the Bodleian and discussing the paper’s past with its alumni.
The Bodleian was the light at the end of my long vac tunnel. The lease on my second year accommodation began a week before freshers arrived, so I planned to use that time to go through the Bod’s OxStu archive. I was slightly stressed, given that this was the first time I had requested to view items from the library’s infamous Swindon warehouses, and I wanted to look at a lot of stuff. I didn’t want to become the nemesis of some poor librarian by being overzealous in my attempts to check out the paper’s archive.
Luckily most of the old editions are stored in chronologically-organised boxes, so I could call up an entire academic year’s worth of papers under one record. I did receive a slightly terse email from one of the librarians asking me to order the boxes to the Upper or Lower Bodleian rather than the Radcliffe Camera, because the boxes were so big that they could not fit on the latter’s self collect shelves. Slightly ashamed that I had not realised this was why the boxes kept ending up in the Bodleian and not in the RadCam where I had ordered them to, I duly obliged.
I got through a good amount in that first week but barely made a dent in the total amount of editions. I thus decided to dedicate many of my spare afternoons and weekends throughout second year looking through a box or two, trying to ensure that I only worked on the history project once my degree work was finished for the week. Even in all that time I didn’t manage to get through absolutely everything. However, the point I had reached was close to when articles first appeared on the modern iteration of the website, so I was able to use that to note any milestone publications.
Beyond the Bod I managed to find a treasure trove of old pre-OxStu SU news publications at the Oxfordshire History Centre in Cowley. I felt like a real historian walking into that place; I had to get an archives card and everything. The staff there were also very helpful in locating editions dating back to Michaelmas 1992 stored in Oxford Westgate Library. The very first editions from the 1991/2 academic year, however, have sadly eluded me.
Having spent so much time staring at the paper over the past year has made me realise how similar an OxStu of 2004 is to an OxStu of 2024. Each Editor-in-Chief might come into the role with a fresh vision for how they want the paper to look, but we’re all too lazy to make radical changes to how the thing looks.
Contacting alumni was a slightly trickier business than archival adventures, but luckily I got some leads by looking through past iterations of the paper’s website on the old faithful Wayback Machine. I discovered an article from 2005 in celebration of the 300th issue of the paper, exploring its history with some commentary from past editors. I managed to get in contact with these editors as well as the author of the celebratory article, who gave up their time to speak to me on the phone or via email about their OxStu experiences.
I ended up meeting the author of the article, Zoe Flood, in the Caffè Nero inside Blackwell’s when she was visiting Oxford. Her own enthusiasm for the paper’s past, including keeping a spreadsheet of contact details for many of her predecessors, was a huge help in my mission to speak to as many alumni as possible. She was able to make introductions for me on many occasions rather than me chasing strangers down on LinkedIn.
One plan that did not come to fruition was to speak to a variety of people working at rival Oxford newspapers, like Cherwell, The Isis and the now defunct The Word, to get a perspective on what the OxStu looked like from the outside. Time constraints meant that this was not possible; I knew that if I carried on with this project into third year it would just never get done.
I began the writing process over the summer vacation of second year in between completing an internship and doing primary reading for my intense special subject paper. I set out with the goal of writing 12,000 words, the length of an Oxford History thesis, and ended up with twice that amount. I just couldn’t stop writing.
I managed to get one of my college History tutors on board to look over the project and give me some feedback. He had suggested early on in the process that the end product would warrant some kind of preservation. I completely forgot about this until after he had read the draft through and offered to ask one of the History Faculty librarians if they would be willing to have a copy deposited in the Bodleian. Amazingly, they said yes, and I quickly managed to secure some funding from my college to print and bind a physical copy in the style of a DPhil thesis. It’s crazy to think that if you search my name up on SOLO, this project will now come up.
My publication is called A History of The Oxford Student because I am well aware that this work is far from definitive.
There are some things I just didn’t have access to or know about because the SU’s recordkeeping for the paper has been sparse at best, and some alumni did not want to talk to me about things that happened decades ago during their student days, which is perfectly understandable.
Additionally, the nature of the paper and its termly turnover of editorial staff means that there will be lots to write about in the future. The Oxford Student is the product of the team behind it, and in that way it is a living, breathing document that changes in small and large ways every time it is published. My commentary on how the paper currently runs will be outdated within a few terms as future editors will inevitably reshape it to their liking. I don’t doubt, and indeed I hope, that another student will eventually publish a history of the paper that far surpasses mine.
I’m also aware that my role within the paper means that I am inevitably presenting a biased view of it. Despite my attempts to look at the paper and its past objectively, I cannot escape my desire to make the paper I have spent so much time immersed in look good. The OxStu was the first society I joined at Oxford in Michaelmas of first year, so it’s been a part of my experience pretty much since I matriculated. This project was my own weird way of giving thanks to the publication that has given me so much in such a short time.
A History of The Oxford Student is now available to read, alongside an appendix listing all Editors-in-Chief of the paper from its founding to today.
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