At the Feb. 19 Academic Senate meeting, UTD administrators doubled down on claims that former Mercury staff resigned and indicated they were searching for new students to fill editorial positions at The Mercury.
The ad-hoc committee formed by Student Government in conjunction with Vice President Rafael Martín held its final meeting Jan. 29, proposing new university policy to oversee student media. The new policy would establish the Committee on Student Media as a replacement for the Student Media Operating Board, whose tasks will include overseeing all of UTD’s student media and creating bylaws for each group. At the Academic Senate meeting, Martin introduced the policy establishing COSM as a step toward reforming The Mercury.
“The consensus was that this proposal was the best solution to get The Mercury up and running as quickly as possible,” Martín said during the meeting.
The original text of S.R. 2024-02, which established the ad-hoc committee, resolved that committee should be formed to “review and rewrite the Student Media Bylaws to be in accordance with the best student journalism and media practices” in response to the original bylaws’ ambiguity, which led to disagreements surrounding removal and appeal procedures and the ultimate dissolution of The Mercury after Student Affairs fired the entire Mercury management team Oct. 1.
The COSM proposal leaves the entire bylaw creation and revision process to its future appointees. Martín said to the Academic Senate that this shift from what Student Government originally intended — a direct revision of the bylaws themselves, rather than a plan to revise them in the future — would allow the university to establish a shared governance model to handle possible revisions.
“We quickly came to the conclusion that [revising the bylaws] was really beyond the scope of what we wanted to tackle,” Martin said during the meeting.
Martín also doubled down on the notion that the Mercury management team voluntarily left their positions in fall 2024. Gene Fitch, vice president of Student Affairs, and Jenni Huffenberger, senior director of marketing and Student Affairs, said October 2024 that they believed the management team had quit after The Mercury’s strike went into effect, despite students never stating they had stopped working for The Mercury.
“Subsequent to the removal of the Editor-in-Chief, the rest of the editorial staff of The Mercury resigned,” Martín said. “And so we were left with no editorial staff to publish The Mercury.”
Following the mass firing of the Mercury’s management team, Student Affairs also removed Lydia Lum, formerly the director of student media, from her position at the end of the fall semester.
Fitch told the Academic Senate that the university remained focused on reviving The Mercury.
“The Mercury is not The Retrograde,” Fitch said. “The Mercury remains the official student newspaper publication at UTD. We are in the process of beginning to recruit students to fill the open leadership positions within The Mercury.”
The Retrograde reached out to the Office of Communications for comment from Fitch regarding what the recruiting process would look like for a new Mercury leadership team. As of publication, Student Affairs has not responded. No details regarding the recruiting process are publicly available.
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From The Mercury to The Washington Post, top-down press restrictions threaten journalism, democracy as a whole – The Retrograde
[…] yet remain scared at the continual threats surrounding student media. While Student Affairs seeks to restart The Mercury, the fear of arrest for walking into student media offices, inconsistently […]