On Nov. 12, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Student Press Law Center sent UTD a letter criticizing the university’s firing of Mercury Editor-in-Chief Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez and the fundamental structure of its oversight over student press, which the organizations claim has led to unconstitutionally censoring its student journalists. The university has not responded to this formal letter as of this article’s publication. UTD’s disinterest in ensuring students’ rights to free speech aren’t stifled is a disappointing, but unsurprising continuation to its legacy of flouting law and morality alike to oppose its students’ actions.
UTD is not interested in the thoughts, activities or needs of its student body the second it becomes an inconvenience. 2024 has been one of, if not the worst, years for student expression, resources and protections on campus.
The year kicked off with SB 17 going into effect Jan. 1, rendering all diversity, equity and inclusion offices and initiatives within Texas universities effectively illegal. In response to this bill, UTD shuttered its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and replaced it with the short-lived Office of Campus Resources and Support, intended to maintain whatever ODEI resources and programs could be salvaged. However, OCRS was dissolved before the end of spring 2024 despite legal compliance with the new law. Numerous diversity-based programs, scholarships and support groups, including the Multicultural Center and Galerstein Gender Center, were lost without creating viable alternatives, and the university’s lack of transparency and disorganization regarding the transition away from ODEI made accessing whatever resources survived — now scattered throughout UTD’s bureaucratic maze — a daunting and difficult task.
UTD quickly went from a campus that provided for its diverse student body well enough to earn national recognition to one where students were forced to pick up the projects previously organized by professional staff. These efforts include, notably, Student Government undertaking and funding the annual Lavender Graduation in 2024, previously overseen by the now-defunct Galerstein Gender Center. Instead of mere compliance with state law, UTD’s overcaution and paranoia around anything that a legislator might theoretically interpret as “DEI” has created a worse administration and unhappier students, due in part to significant gaps in university support systems for students — particularly ethnic, cultural and queer minorities.
Students, naturally, will lose faith in the goodwill of an administration that, when asked to cut down a tree, razes down the whole forest. While resources for minority students disappear, the university’s promotional rhetoric celebrating the student body’s diversity and international focus has not slowed. Clearly UTD values diversity only as a selling point.
These unacceptable behaviors from UTD’s leadership, while worsening in recent years, are part of a historical pattern of disinterest — and hostility — toward its students, and mirror other historical and current-day examples of higher education opposing and throttling its students’ will. In spring 2023, Student Government’s resolution calling on UTD to divest from arms manufacturers that support Israel’s war effort fell on deaf ears, with President Richard Benson going out of his way to express disdain for the resolution in a letter to The Texas Jewish Post on April 26 that year.
This disinterest came into starker relief as the semester continued, with years of pro-Palestine student demonstrations only resulting in an audience with the Office of the President after a seven-hour sit-in at the Administration Building. The apathy revealed itself as active hostility on May 1, when UTD followed in the footsteps of schools like UT Austin by summoning over 60 law enforcement officers in riot gear to storm a peaceful pro-Palestine encampment organized at Chess Plaza. Police officers hit community members and local journalists, destroyed property and arrested 21 total individuals, who were held overnight at Collin County Jail. Students dared to oppose war and genocide by organizing for divestment, following in the footsteps of anti-apartheid university protesters that similarly demanded divestment from South Africa, and university officials responded by orchestrating the largest arrest in recorded campus history.
After their arrests, students faced academic punishments like deferred suspension and denial of degree at the whims of Student Affairs, which circumvented its own established disciplinary procedures to deal with these students. When Ravi Prakash, computer science professor and former speaker of the Academic Senate, questioned Dean of Students Amanda Smith about this underhanded, non-communicative approach during the Oct. 16 senate meeting, she told him “not to get riled up” and derided him for not being civil.
Circumventions for the sake of convenience would continue with the fall 2024 death of The Mercury, UTD’s previous student-run newspaper, whose 40-year run was cut short when Student Affairs removed Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez as Editor-in-Chief of the publication before suspending all Mercury emails, took down the website twice and fired the staff that went on strike to protest the removal — which was the entire staff. Following months of tension between student journalists and administration because of The Mercury’s critical coverage of May 1, the removal itself was based in shaky reasoning and conducted rudely and unprofessionally, and revealed major, easily-abused holes in the Student Media bylaws that governed The Mercury.
When students appealed the removal as per the bylaws, the Office of Student Affairs disregarded the bylaws’ established procedures — even though technicalities in those same bylaws were used to fire Olivares. Afterward, when Student Government and the Academic Senate attempted to organize meetings to review what had happened, Student Affairs responded by telling these groups to stay in their lanes and that Student Affairs would handle the Mercury situation. The university’s actions were so obviously biased and destructive that non-profit advocacy groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Student Press Law Center said the university was flouting its constitutional obligations to protect students’ free expression. At no point has administration engaged with The Mercury’s strike demands since the firing.
The arrests on May 1 aren’t unique, and they aren’t unprecedented. How did we get to the point where campus administrators feel comfortable attacking students or ridiculing and arresting professors? It’s a natural extension of a dangerous preexisting university culture: one where campus administrators are comfortable demoting and firing student media advisers on a whim; one where the Dean of Students can change policy regarding the Student Code of Conduct without consulting the Academic Senate, Staff Council or Student Government beforehand; one where using chalk on campus is prohibited because it could be used to spread messages the university does not approve of, but a Heritage Foundation executive is welcomed to campus and showered in awards. All of this can be attributed to the breakdown in trust between campus administration and the students and faculty it oversees. Faculty and students come to UTD with the goal of conducting research, teaching and learning, while campus administration only seems interested in silencing expressions it dislikes and appeasing its donors.
Administration is blinded by its lust for a squeaky-clean image and financial gain. In its pursuit for profit and growth, a dangerous bubble of policy and negligence has been created that endangers the whole campus community, not just students. University employees openly criticize UTD’s flippancy toward its constituents’ various needs, finding material resources, team sizes and other supports for researchers and staff dragging behind while flashy expansionist projects continue.
We do not have to live like this. Schools like the University of Connecticut, Maryland University, the University of Michigan and Rice University — to name a few — have all reaffirmed their commitment to diversity and inclusion on their campuses despite opposition to DEI programs. Institutions like Trinity College in Ireland and the University of Brussels in Belgium have heeded their students’ calls to divest from war and genocide. While no school is perfect, it is rare for a university to show such flagrant disregard for the very community it claims to serve — by policing and punishing it; by ignoring its demands raised through “proper” legal channels; by treating its own rules, which should ensure fair and consistent governance, as completely optional when convenient.
Events like the May 1 arrests and the dissolution of The Mercury prove one important fact, however: direct, organized action is the most successful way for students’ voices to be heard at UTD, and student movements that dare to disrupt and know their own worth will be the future of ground-up change at UTD.
Such movements — with real stakes and hard, thankless work — are daunting, difficult and frequently end in disaster. But success stories abound all over the country, if one knows where to look. The Harvard Crimson, Daily Bruin, Daily Californian and The Collegian are just some of the student newspapers who have broken away from their universities’ administration and prospered independently, defeating the “common knowledge” that student projects will crumble without university support. UTD is home to over 30,000 students with a dizzying array of backgrounds and skillsets; the capacity to challenge administration’s apathy and persevere through its hostility squarely rests with us. The only question is whether the student body will allow these injustices to become the new normal and forget they can be fought at all.
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