The Mercury’s website, utdmercury.com, went down for a few hours March 24 and returned online the next day with multiple modifications, after remaining unchanged since former Mercury staff went on strike in September last year. The only individuals theoretically capable of modifying the website are administrators in Student Affairs.
On March 25, the website no longer had a landing page, a website header or a search bar. Various links had been removed from the footer and the name “The Mercury” had been replaced by “The UTD Mercury.” The following articles were completely or partially deleted from the website when it returned online March 25:
News:
- “Mercury EIC fired by UTD”
- “Former EIC appeals termination to Student Media Operating Board”
- “Student Affairs prohibits SMOB from hearing former EIC’s appeal, violating bylaws”
- “Academic senate declares support for Student Government’s Mercury strategy”
Opinion:
- “Editorial: Reinstate Gregorio as EIC now”
- “Using passive voice in Gaza coverage is more harrowing than you think”
- Artwork of Ken Paxton was deleted on the piece “Paxtonism: A wild and wicked saga about intimidation and overall political fuckery”
The March 25 footer was missing links to the Donate, Contributors, Podcast Episodes, Mission Statement, FAQ and Contact Us pages, with the contact and contributors pages appearing entirely deleted and completely scrubbed of all information, respectively. Without a search bar, none of the remaining pages can be easily reached from within the website and must be found through a search engine or accessed via URL. The September 16 newspaper page was also removed, as was the custom error page.
The mission statement page was heavily edited. It no longer mentions social media as a method The Mercury uses to publish content; has eliminated a paragraph about The Mercury’s goal being to strengthen the skills of its staff; has removed a sentence that said UTD and The Mercury were committed to prioritizing nondiscrimination in its coverage and hiring practices; has removed a sentence that said that The Mercury should inform and entertain its audience while holding those in power accountable; and removed a sentence that said The Mercury was fundamentally a student-run organization.
The older iterations of the Mercury website, including now-deleted articles, pages and information, are accessible through the Wayback Machine. As of publication, the website has changed further, with its homepage reverted to the website layout The Mercury used in Spring 2024 with an additional complete lack of links in the footer and a lack of website sections or a search bar.
The Retrograde reached out to various members of Student Affairs and the Office of Communications for comment on the significant changes made to The Mercury’s website. As of publication, both offices have not responded.
Mathematics senior Avery Bainbridge was a member of the Student Media Operating Board up until the sudden end of its operations last semester. Bainbridge said SMOB has not had any meetings since October 2024, nor did it approve any of the changes made to the website.
At the March 26 meeting of the Academic Senate, Michael Kesden, physics professor and senate speaker, announced the policy to form a new Committee on Student Media had just been approved by President Richard Benson and that the Academic Senate would begin appointing its two members to the committee. The Staff Council, Student Government and Graduate Student Assembly all said they planned on having representatives appointed by mid-April. The changes to the Mercury website occurred after Student Affairs stopped calling meetings of SMOB and before the COSM formed, suggesting neither student media oversight committee was involved.
“It comes across to me as an effort to suppress negative reporting and details of the strike as part of a move to start a ‘clean slate’ new Mercury,” Bainbridge said. “The intelligence of our student population is underestimated by the assumption that this plan would work.”
Dominic Coletti, program officer for campus rights and student press at the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, said FIRE rarely saw an entire organization fired like what happened with The Mercury in October last year, and he had never heard of campus administrators taking down articles from a student-run website. Jonathan Gaston-Falk, staff attorney at the Student Press Law Center, said that SPLC was unaware of any instance of a student-media outlet being run or changed without student cooperation.
“Student media requires students,” Gaston-Falk said. “Any resulting publication produced without students cannot be called student media and would necessarily be considered speech of the university itself.”
Gaston-Falk said that student papers like The Mercury are historical records of what happens at universities, and by deleting articles, administrators are deleting and changing the historical record of a university. Gatson-Falk said this action also raised concerns about free speech and censorship.
“Eliminating content critical of authority figures by those authority figures themselves runs counter to the bedrock purposes of the First Amendment when it comes to speech on public college campuses,” Gatson-Falk said. “Unchecked, this leads to a sanitization of student voices that are less interested in or completely withdrawn from holding our public officials and institutions accountable for their actions and decisions.”
Coletti said that this action wasn’t just immediately harmful, but also had major implications for the future of student press at UTD.
“It would be bad enough if the university were merely shutting down an outlet for completely viewpoint-neutral reasons, but especially in this instance, it looks like this is in direct retaliation to critical coverage that the paper is doing,” Coletti said. “It sets a horrible precedent for student press, and it actively hurts the information environment on campus.”
Coletti said it was critical for students and faculty to express their discontent with these changes with campus administrators because allowing unilateral changes would only endanger student press at UTD. Coletti said if The Mercury started publishing again without clear and substantive changes, it would be difficult for students to know if this was anything more than just another mouthpiece of the university.
“While no one is currently occupying the role of Mercury Editor-in-Chief, that does not mean that the university suddenly gets to subsume the entire paper and take over all of its editorial operations such as what articles are and aren’t available,” Coletti said, “And for the university to not just do that, but do that in a way that suppresses the viewpoints it doesn’t like, is truly worrying from a First Amendment standpoint.”
The Student Media bylaws, detailing how student media editorial freedom interacts with advisory board oversight, were taken down from the UTD Student Media website following the Mercury student strike. With the bylaws removed from the UTD website and emphasis on student leadership no longer present in The Mercury’s mission statement, Student Affairs no longer publicly highlights the student-led nature of The Mercury.