On March 10, Student Affairs administration began rolling out its plan to hire new students to fill leadership roles at The Mercury. We, the management and staff at The Retrograde, unequivocally denounce this.
For the past ten months, student media leadership, under the direction of Vice President Gene Fitch and Senior Director of Marketing Jenni Huffenberger, has done nothing but attack free press on campus.
When UTD violently cracked down on last year’s encampment organized by pro-Palestine student protesters, The Mercury provided live breaking news coverage of this historic moment in UTD history — which culminated in the May 20 special issue of The Mercury. In response to this coverage, Student Affairs demoted The Mercury’s then-adviser Jonathan Stewart and appointed Huffenberger, his boss, as interim director and adviser of Student Media in his place. In her first meeting with the Mercury management team, Huffenberger called the May 20 issue “journalistic malpractice” without concretely explaining why, insisting it portrayed UTD in a negative light. That very issue has been critiqued by local journalists, student media mentors and lawyers and found not to be “journalistic malpractice” at all.
When The Mercury’s editorial board refused to submit to prior review, the new Director of Student Media Lydia Lum threatened to prevent staff from traveling to educational conferences. In mid-September, Lum initiated the process to remove Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez as editor-in-chief on charges The Mercury’s entire management team found unreasonable, resulting in the newspaper going on strike. Later, when Lum had a change of heart and attempted to advocate for the students at The Mercury, Student Affairs fired her.
When the Academic Senate and Student Government attempted to mediate upon hearing news of Mercury’s strike, Fitch told them to not interfere in his process since the student media bylaws did not grant the senate or SG authority over student media. Student Affairs would go on to flout or circumvent these very bylaws numerous times — for instance, by denying Olivares a proper appeal procedure for his termination.
In October, Student Affairs fired every single member of The Mercury’s management team after sending an official email saying their employment would be reviewed by the Student Media Operating Board. Such a review never came. Instead, university administrators chose to unilaterally fire the striking student journalists without due process, calling them voluntary resignations.
When free speech organizations like the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression and the Student Press Law Center sent letters to UTD advising leadership to change course and actually support student journalists, the university refused to respond.
The Mercury was placed on hiatus by Student Government, Academic Senate and Vice President Rafael Martín so a committee could revise the bylaws governing student media. These bylaws, vague and easily abused against student journalists, were weaponized to oust Olivares from his editor-in-chief position and remain the center of former Mercury staff’s strike demands. But these bylaws were not changed in any way before Martin declared the committee adjourned and The Mercury ready to revive.
What the committee did achieve was creating the Committee on Student Media, which is tasked with revising the student media bylaws that have ineffectively governed student media since 2017. But the COSM first needs to be approved by the Academic Senate, Student Government and Staff Council before it can start existing and revising the bylaws. Student Affairs trying to revive The Mercury in the middle of this legal process is a direct violation of the hiatus The Mercury is under, as well as the principles of shared governance and student First Amendment rights. Once again, Student Affairs is choosing to ignore university policy and procedures in favor of doing whatever it pleases with The Mercury. Last time administrators did this, they destroyed The Mercury. We wonder what new lows they may reach as they work to create their own anti-student paper.
To put it simply: Student Affairs did not address or resolve any of the issues that caused The Mercury’s former staff to strike in protest. Without making any meaningful changes, administrators are attempting to resurrect The Mercury as if those exact same problems will not return to haunt its new editors. Administrators calling what independent journalists and student media mentors deemed excellent breaking news coverage “journalistic malpractice” because it doesn’t align with UTD’s image doesn’t just disappear overnight. Arbitrary punishments and the random removal of advisers and editors won’t suddenly stop now that ten months of complete administrative inaction have passed. Student Affairs is creating a new Mercury with a docile leadership team that will be too afraid to publish any story that might offend administration’s sensibilities after seeing what they did to itsthe previous leaders for daring to be critical.
The Retrograde has always been vocally open to negotiating with administration. We would like to continue working with UTD similar to how The Mercury did so we can pay stipends and contributor fees to our members, use campus resources and more. The second UTD administration invites us to the negotiation table, The Retrograde will be there, ready to work on a compromise. But despite repeatedly extending invitations for reconciliation to UTD administration, we have received nothing but cold silence or dismissal. It is clear Student Affairs does not care to solve the problems that led to The Mercury shutting down, but merely restart it as quickly as possible to save face for the university.
The Retrograde is filled with former Mercury staff and management who left The Mercury because of their refusal to work at a censored and caged publication. Since its creation, The Retrograde has provided UTD’s community with news, culture and opinion articles. We will continue to publish online per our biweekly schedule, as well as publish print issues once per month. We have no intention to stop our coverage — which includes critical investigative topics like the aftermath of the May 1 arrests; research funding on campus; UTD’s search for a new president; internal scandals and more — just because Student Affairs seeks to puppet the corpse of The Mercury in a macabre display.
According to flyers distributed by Student Affairs, applications for The Mercury’s leadership positions are open until March 31. We urge all students on campus who care about free press, critical and meaningful student journalism and the fight against administrative overreach not to apply for either of these positions, and to continue calling on UTD to negotiate with The Retrograde as UTD’s current student-run newspaper.
Any visitors to The Mercury’s website will be greeted by a large banner that reads “MERCURY ON STRIKE,” and a breakdown of the three simple strike demands student journalists started out with: 1) the reinstatement of Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez as editor-in-chief; 2) improved bylaws for managing disputes between students and administrators; 3) democratically elected newspaper leadership rather than appointment by administration. Our demands today are different. This entire public spectacle could have been avoided if Student Affairs leadership chose to talk with students instead of violating its own procedures to punish them more.
This isn’t simply an issue of policy misinterpretation and an erroneous firing, but an issue of students’ free speech and the protections surrounding it. Student Affairs does nothing to protect student journalists, and students will remain in danger unless there is a fundamental shift in how student media is organized. A shift wherein the students themselves work with industry professionals to develop their own operating rules and procedures and can engage in investigative journalism without fear of administrative pushback is the only way student journalism can succeed on any university campus.
Student Affairs must recognize The Retrograde as the independent student newspaper on campus, since mere editorial independence only goes so far when UTD is empowered to mass fire editors on a whim. Student Affairs must allow COSM to amend the student media bylaws before it begins attempting to lure more students into its stranglehold at The Mercury. Student Affairs must take The Retrograde’s strike demands seriously and engage with our publication as a campus entity with far-reaching public support, the recognition of Student Government, a dedicated readership and cumulative decades of experience writing stories and managing a newspaper.
If Student Affairs wishes to pretend nothing ever happened and they can effortlessly revive the publication they murdered, then we will ensure that our experience, expertise and industry connections never make it to The Mercury. We would love to see them find a new batch of student journalists at a school that has no journalism program, or find them industry mentors when the entire student journalism world and DFW journalistic community is on The Retrograde’s side. If UTD administration is uninterested in negotiating, The Retrograde is set up to continue functioning independently without any university support. We thank our dedicated readers, donors and supporters for making this possible.
Support the continued student journalist strike against Student Affairs by adding your name to our statement here, or by donating to our GoFundMe or Patreon. To voice your displeasure at administration’s Mercury revival attempt, email gene.fitch@utdallas.edu and jennib@utdallas.edu with the template provided here or call 972-883-6236 (Fitch) and 972-883-2244 (Huffenberger).