We could tell you that the death of The Mercury was a slow and bitter march, where Student Affairs administrators crossed one line and then the next, slowly gagging our freedom as student journalists until the publication was left blue-faced and spluttering on the floor. And that would be true. After administration called our coverage of last year’s pro-Palestine student encampment “journalistic malpractice” with no evidence to support their claim, they cracked down harder and harder — slashing our pay, trying to eradicate our editorial freedom and demanding adviser involvement in every aspect of our material prior to publication — until they destroyed us.
We could also tell you that the death came like a sudden stab wound. And that we were all there during the Friday evening Microsoft Teams meeting which sank the butcher knife deep into The Mercury’s ribs, poked it out through the spine and twisted. That’s what it felt like when we cried our eyes out in the aftermath, terrified and incredulous. The university had chosen the worst possible option for free press on campus and was making no attempt to hide it.
Part I: The twisting knife
That Friday meeting of the Student Media Operating Board, which oversaw The Mercury, had only one item on its agenda: the termination of Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez as Editor-in-Chief effective immediately.
The administrators running the meeting were vindictive and cruel beyond belief. They refused to let Olivares defend himself, raised their voices at him and called him a liar when he attempted to refute their claims. They brought forward three bogus charges on which to dismiss him from his student leadership role, somehow forgot to even agree on which charge he violated and showed no evidence of his violation. They voted to terminate him after designing the meeting so that only one other student of the four student voting members and three other Student Media leaders expected to be at SMOB meetings was even present. And all of this was accomplished through the vague bylaws governing Student Media that administrators felt free to twist or disregard as they saw fit. The standard of evidence was the opinion of Student Affairs administration — nothing else mattered so long as Olivares was gone.
While Olivares’ official reason for termination wasn’t “critical coverage of how UTD handled the pro-Palestine encampment,” it was abundantly clear to us from the months Student Affairs spent shaming and restricting us for said coverage that they thought they could stymie this coverage by cutting off The Mercury’s head.
Little did they know we were a hydra. Cutting off one head only redoubled our commitment to reporting the truth.
Little did they know we were a hydra. Cutting off one head only redoubled our commitment to reporting the truth.
We sobbed. We panicked. But we weren’t helpless. The day before this fateful meeting, Olivares had received an email invite to the Microsoft Teams call and read it for the execution summons it was. The rest of us in Mercury management unanimously agreed that if Olivares was axed, we’d strike — because obviously, if the next editor continues the same investigative coverage Olivares championed and that we all believe in, then another head will roll, and another, and another, and that’s no way to run a stable and successful newspaper.
So we dabbed our eyes and drove to Zenna’s, a Thai restaurant open at ungodly late hours, where the table became our war room and some scratch paper became our battle map. We decided that our next issue — coming out the following Monday — would be a special strike issue, after which we’d stop publishing until our strike demands were met. We laid out three demands for university administration. One, Olivares’ immediate reinstatement. Two, amending the bylaws so they properly protect students and editorial independence instead of becoming bludgeons to abuse them. And three, allowing the Editor-in-Chief to be a democratically elected position rather than one appointed by the university.
And we went public. Over the weekend, we collected over 1,200 signatures on our strike statement from students, faculty, alumni and student organizations supporting what we stood for — a free and fair press.
As the presses roared Monday morning, so too did administration. Our Mercury emails were suspended. Decades of notes, articles, training materials and records built up by generations of student leaders were erased in an instant. We were told via email that SMOB was going to “review our positions,” positions SMOB didn’t even have direct authority over — a classic intimidation tactic — and Student Affairs administration demanded we turn over the passwords to Mercury social media accounts that they had no legal right to claim. Half a month later on Oct. 1, we found out that the administration actually fired us that Monday when Student Affairs Business Manager Christine Belcher showed up in our inboxes asking us to return half our September paychecks. Apparently, administration had decided no one worked at The Mercury effective Sept. 17, the day after the strike paper came out.
Olivares appealed his termination the next day, Tuesday. The Student Media bylaws — under whose pretense Olivares had been fired — laid out a clear process through which appeals were handled. However, this process was completely flouted by Jenni Huffenberger — senior director of marketing and student media, and the loudest, cruelest voice shouting down Olivares that fateful Friday — who unilaterally decided the appeal’s verdict: Olivares would not be reinstated. Of course, this decision came a week after it was due per the bylaws’ stipulations.
Seeing administration’s hypocrisy laid bare, we decided we weren’t going to hold out hope for the university negotiating with us in good faith. Students, faculty and alumni still needed campus and local news, and we still had so much more investigating to do. The free press couldn’t stop just because we were protesting censorship — that’s exactly what a censoring force wants to happen. And so, two weeks later on Sept. 30, we published the inaugural issue of The Retrograde, a completely independent, non-profit educational newsroom where we no longer had to fear the ire of administration for doing our jobs as journalists and standing firm in our convictions. We have been publishing biweekly during the academic year and three times during the summer, with plenty of breaking news as it crops up, in the year-plus since.
The free press couldn’t stop just because we were protesting censorship — that’s exactly what a censoring force wants to happen.
Us striking students, Student Government and the Academic Senate all called for dialogue and deescalation during this tense situation. But Student Affairs did not come to the table until they were required to, under an ad-hoc committee Student Government and the university’s chief of staff made to revise the inconsistencies in the bylaws so future investigative student journalists wouldn’t be punished like us. Student Affairs’ heel-digging resistance merely foreshadowed the endless, excruciating battles to come.
Part II: Hard-won truths
What was happening to us journalists was not unique in the context of UTD. It was the culmination of a calculated campaign to silence critical voices on campus — manifested through administrators removing our newspapers from kiosks, demoting Student Media advisors for a “lack of oversight,” removing the campus Spirit Rocks after students spoke about Palestine on them and, of course, the violent arrest of 21 students, alumni and faculty on May 1 last year for protesting genocide. We aren’t the first students to face the wrath of a university made to look bad by its students, and we won’t be the last.
Administrators are not your friends. That lesson was solidified for us as we watched the Student Media bylaw revision process unfold.
Administrators are not your friends.
For months, the ad-hoc committee argued over the bylaws and eventually created UTDPP1124 before declaring a job well done and dissolving. Despite the committee’s stated purpose being to revise the bylaws, it did not even touch the bylaws. All UTDPP1124 did was create a new committee, the Committee on Student Media, and this new committee was now tasked with revising the bylaws.
In other words, despite months of deliberation, an outpouring of suggestions from students on the committee and an insistence from students to consult outside student media mentors and media law experts for help revising the bylaws, the only result was a can kicked a little further down the road. Us students knew at this point how critical precise, untwistable legal language is in protecting the underdog. Kicking the can down the road meant the administration deliberately didn’t want to implement any real protections for student journalists.
Kicking the can down the road meant the administration deliberately didn’t want to implement any real protections for student journalists.
The Student Government resolution establishing the ad-hoc committee explicitly stated that The Mercury would not resume operations until the bylaws were properly revised, ratified and implemented. But this provision would quickly be stomped all over by COSM when it formed.
COSM has been active since late spring, and rather than acknowledging any of us striking journalists’ demands or the ridiculous inconsistencies and overreaches within the old bylaws, the committee’s approach has been to pretend that nothing even happened in the first place. The committee has ignored Student Government’s resolutions to recognize The Retrograde and keep The Mercury on hiatus, instead charging forward to hire a new Editor-In-Chief at The Mercury. This new editor was a high school senior at the time of her appointment, recruited almost directly from her high school paper with no prior experience in collegiate or professional journalism, with no ties to our student body and, crucially, no reason to mistrust the word of the administrators who scouted her out.
Who wouldn’t say yes in that editor’s position, to what at first glance looks to be a golden opportunity to make a mark on one’s campus while earning a plentiful monthly stipend? To make a difference, amplify student voices and do so with the full support of the funding and resources of Student Affairs?
But the truth is, the new editor is fresh meat for administration to turn into a puppet who does exactly as they wish, kept on a leash labeled “free speech” and “editorial independence” that’s just long enough to make the new Mercury’s staff feel like they have journalistic freedom. When the gilded cage is all you know, pushing against it seems unthinkable.
When the gilded cage is all you know, pushing against it seems unthinkable.
But us seasoned journalists, who slept outside a jailhouse, risked arrest and lost the jobs that paid our bills in the name of press freedom, know the difference between a glossy veneer of independence and the real thing. Real independence isn’t wrought from the hands of a censor-happy administration. Real independence challenges those in power, interrogates the status quo and certainly doesn’t unquestioningly celebrate a university that intimidates its students at best and arrests them at worst.
Student Affairs presented no other option to COSM besides voting in the handpicked new editor. Any disapproval of the pick from committee members was seen as sabotaging the grand return of The Mercury. At any point during the editor-approving and bylaw-revising process, if a student raised concerns about how certain choices impact editorial independence, freedom from prior review or other tenets of journalistic ethics, Student Affairs staff in COSM would dismiss their concerns or strongarm them into silence. Numerous students burnt out during their time on the committee from how hostile the environment is.
And now, thanks to that hostility and strong-arming, The Mercury is armed with a new staff, a printing budget and an inaugural issue. As fellow journalists, we commend the hard work it takes to get a newspaper together. But does a free bird celebrate when it hears its caged compatriot sing about how shiny its golden cage is?
Ultimately, the very existence of a rushed new Mercury speaks to how predatory Student Affairs is. They are preying on a lack of information, hoping that students won’t know enough about why The Mercury disappeared in the first place to question being on its staff for the grand return. They are taking advantage of these students’ ambition, their drive, their desire to contribute and their passion for journalism by offering them this avenue to do all that and more, but with hidden strings that will choke them out if they toe out of line. The incoming staff either believe the bylaws have been fixed or that bylaws don’t matter in the first place, when they were the very knife the old Mercury was hacked to pieces by. The incoming staff believe administration wouldn’t lead them wrong in their hour of need, instead of learning the real-world lesson that whoever signs your paychecks ultimately controls your stories — just look at the impact Jeff Bezos has had on the The Washington Post.
They are taking advantage of these students’ ambition, their drive, their desire to contribute and their passion for journalism by offering them this avenue to do all that and more, but with hidden strings that will choke them out if they toe out of line.
The knife that killed the old Mercury isn’t gone. Simply reading COSM’s new bylaws shows that if anything, there are more knives silently hanging over the new staff’s heads and fewer ways to express opposition once the blades start falling.
COSM’s current draft of the revised bylaws are somehow even worse than the incoherent, contradictory bylaws under which Olivares was fired. The committee chair, communications professor McClain Watson, has repeatedly told members to not contact media law or journalism experts for guidance since that would violate the “integrity of the process” — a ridiculous prohibition meant to stack every deliberation in Student Affairs’ favor by removing impartiality and expert insight from the process. When no experts are consulted, no one is left who can contradict Student Affairs without being brushed off as a mere student.
Even more brazenly, COSM members including Vice President of Student Affairs Gene Fitch have directly insulted The Retrograde as a publication during its meetings, saying we are spreading false information trying to make the university look bad. They even suggested we never reach out to them to understand campus issues when we write our articles, despite us contacting them multiple times a cycle for comment and never hearing back.
That very COSM is the same dysfunctional committee which birthed Student Affairs’ Mercury strategy. The strategy in question? Revamp the paper; staff it with students who will never go against you; refuse to put away the knives you’ll use to chop up those students if, on an off-chance, they do publish something critical; and don’t forget to keep ignoring campus’ seasoned journalists who are still asking for their strike demands to be met.
Perhaps the most damning proof that Student Affairs seeks to censor student journalists came in the hiatus period leading up to The Mercury’s relaunch. Administrators deleted several pro-Palestine and strike-focused articles from The Mercury’s website without any rationale or formal retractions explaining why. What a harrowing form of housekeeping to welcome the new Mercury team with, and how strange that the revived Mercury’s staff brand their publishing and events with pro-free speech language when their very own website is marred with the scars of censorship.
How strange that the revived Mercury’s staff brand their publishing and events with pro-free speech language when their very own website is marred with the scars of censorship.
Part III: Going forward
Our stance is clear: Student Affairs’ current course of action, between the secretive COSM, the revived Mercury and the ignored Retrograde, is unacceptable. Hidden information, contradictory bylaws, gag orders and novice editors are the culmination of a desperate multi-year attempt to stifle students and control Student Media’s messaging through dictatorial means. It is a retrograde motion against the very principles of free press and educated citizens, and we denounce it.
We do not fault The Mercury’s current staff for crossing the picket line to work at the publication — the pay is lucrative for a college student and the job is, of course, fun. But our hearts do break for them. They will either never get to do challenging, impactful student journalism — the kind that has community members writing in about how meaningful your work is, the kind that changes the nation’s student media landscape — or they will face all the same insults, censors and anguish we did for trying to follow the Society of Professional Journalist’s most essential ethical principle: “Seek truth and report it.” Their college journalism experience will either be grossly stunted as they become another PR arm for the university or rotted by hostile administrators.
Their college journalism experience will either be grossly stunted as they become another PR arm for the university or rotted by hostile administrators.
It is no secret that us Retrograde founders struggled a lot in the beginning. We scrambled to find new jobs to pay the bills. We crowdsourced funding for crucial expenses like website hosting. Some of us couldn’t contribute to The Retrograde because we relied on university equipment like cameras. Our bones creaked under the heightened workload of running a nonprofit as well as managing a newspaper. But as we got used to it, we fell in love with our new publication that is award-winning, staffed by passionate, brilliant people and, best of all, blissfully free to publish what we know is right.
And no matter what Student Affairs tries next, our presses will continue to roar.
To honor our founding principle of full transparency, we have republished the articles administrators felt were worth silently deleting. We have also published the most recent COSM email chains discussing the bylaws and meeting minutes, all prior COSM meeting minutes and the current version of the revised bylaws themselves. No changes were made to the bylaws during the Nov. 7 meeting of COSM.
Deleted articles:
- Mercury EIC fired by UTD
- Editorial: Reinstate Gregorio as EIC now
- Using the passive voice in Gaza coverage is more harrowing than you think
- Academic senate declares support for Student Government’s Mercury strategy
- Former EIC appeals termination to Student Media Operating Board
- Student Affairs prohibits SMOB from hearing former EIC’s appeal, violating bylaws
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