In retrograde: UT Dallas students fight to preserve independence, free press

May 1, 2024, 4:30 AM. 

In the moments just before sunrise, a group of students and faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas begin to pitch their tents at Chess Plaza.

Just days before, they had witnessed DPS troopers descend onto their sister school in Austin, donning riot gear and armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers to arrest over a hundred protestors in the span of two days.

The Chess Plaza group and the demonstrators in Austin both shared the same goal: Demand the UT system divest from military companies manufacturing munitions for Israel, whose siege of Gaza had killed approximately 34,000 Palestinians at the time of the protests.

By noon, ten tents were set up, and a group of around 100 students had gathered at the encampment. At 4:00 p.m., a mixture of DPS, Collin County and campus police officers, who had been hovering around the growing demonstration, began forcefully moving into the crowd, arresting at least 20 and tearing down the encampment.

During the push, a Fox 4 reporter was struck and injured by an officer with bolt cutters as he attempted to record the arrest of Ali Alibhai, an assistant art history professor. An hour later, police snipers were spotted on the roof of the Student Services building, and by 5:47 p.m., officers had cleared the plaza of all demonstrators.

Just a day earlier, two students, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez and Maria Shaikh, became the editor-in-chief and managing editor of the Mercury, the student newspaper of UT Dallas since 1980. 

According to Olivares, he had to hit the ground running.

“I just saw like a ton of messages saying ‘There’s an encampment on campus. What are you going to do about that?’ So we very quickly organized the plan,” Olivares said. “We had members of Mercury staff, including myself, just taking turns being at the encampment in the morning. We worked to get our very first article out by noon.”

Print issue draws reprisals

On May 20, the Mercury released their first print issue since the encampments. The cover, which featured a photo of protestors facing a wall of state troopers read: “Welcome to UTD. Students Speak, Admin Silences.”

The eight pages present a timeline of how protest and police response unfolded by the hour, and an editorial written by Olivares, Shaikh, and two additional editors accused the administration, including UTD President Richard Benson, of “weaponizing excessive force” against student protestors. 

It did not take long for the paper to land on the administration’s desks, or for them to make new decisions around then-interim Student Media Director Jonathan Stewart, who advised the Mercury.

“Two days after that issue was published, Jonathan was demoted,” Olivares said. “At the time, there were no grounds provided as to why he was demoted. He just told us that I was next on the chopping block if we didn’t watch out.”

Jenni Huffenberger, a senior director for marketing and student media, took over Stewart’s position.

Huffenberger made her thoughts on the recent issue clear during a May 23 meeting with managing staff, which she did not know was being recorded.

“So the latest issue obviously has gotten the attention of the administration. What I am going to come in here and say is the critical approach starts right now. This is journalistic activism,” Huffenberger said in the recording.

“What I see here is wall-to wall-activism. And that really is journalistic malpractice. There has been a longstanding issue with getting [the] administration to speak with you all. I will tell you that this doesn’t help.”

Concerns raised over prior review

In June, Lydia Lum was hired as the official director of Student Media. She had worked as a professional journalist for over 20 years, and it was her track record that led Olivares and Shaikh to approve her as the Mercury’s adviser.

However, there was one thing she mentioned during her interview that raised a red flag for Olivares and Shaikh: prior review of articles before publication.

“During this interview, Lydia brings up that her previous publication that she advised for, the Horizon at Indiana University Southeast, that she used to basically read their articles and offer feedback and advice to them prior to publication,” Shaikh said.  “And we told her, ‘We don’t want to do that here at the Mercury … That is too much (like) prior review for us and we would prefer that critiques happen after publication.’”

Besides pitch and editorial meetings, where staffers discuss story ideas and editors look over final articles, Lum was given “blanket access,” according to Shaikh. This included weekly meetings with Olivares, meetings which Shaikh says included discussion on “content and angle decisions,” as well as full access to students working in the office. 

“And she seemed super amenable to this,” Shaikh said. “So that’s when we went ahead with hiring her. We did not expect that issue to come back the way that it did.”

On Aug. 23, in a meeting with the managing staff of the Mercury, Lum declared that members of the Mercury would be prohibited from attending collegiate student journalism conferences.

This “business decision,” as Lum called it, was due to not being allowed access to these traditionally private meetings over the summer. According to Lum, this made it impossible for her to choose delegates for these conferences. 

Olivares immediately took issue with this justification, and in a recording of the meeting, he criticizes Lum over what he calls “punitive action” against the Mercury. He also defends denying prior review as necessary towards maintaining editorial independence.

“Not prior review, just listening,” Lum responded.

Beforehand, she had also justified her decision by claiming the staff acted like they had nothing left to learn.

“You can complain all you want,” Lum said. “I’m not trying to cut off your educational sources or anything like that, but if you really believe you have enough among you, then you don’t need to go to that, because I cannot make an informed choice on who to send. And that’s my responsibility.”

Lum was not aware she was being recorded in the meeting.

Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel to the Student Press Law Center, says that prior review is highly discouraged by the collegiate journalist community, largely due to the high potential it has to lead to censorship by university administrations.

“We’ve got some good case law that indicates that even prior review, a reading only ahead of time, is also unlawful at the college level,” Heistand said. “Very often the people that are going to be reading the content, at least in schools, they’re sometimes the people that you’re covering.

The city paper doesn’t let the city council read their story about the city council before it’s published. It’s just bad journalism.”

Olivares called before board

Unfortunately for Olivares, objecting to prior review would come at a cost.

On Sept. 12, he received an email from Lum containing a memo for a vote to be held by the Student Media Operating Board, which oversees all student media at UT Dallas, the next day. The meeting only contained one item: “Removal of The Mercury Editor-in-Chief.”

Three charges were brought against Olivares in the memo sent by Lum: “Holding a second appointment as a student employee,” since Olivares also worked as a peer advisor, “cost overruns” involving physical prints of the Mercury and “bypassing advisor involvement.”

As the meeting began on Zoom, Olivares sat in a conference room in front of his computer, with managing staff members observing from the sides. The subsequent meeting would last over two hours.

One of the SMOB voting members on screen, undergraduate math senior Avery Bainbridge, had his doubts before the precedings even began.

“The meeting start was delayed initially. The chair of the board, Lydia Lum, explained to us that we were waiting for more people to come,” Bainbridge said. “But actually, we found out later that everybody else on the board had already been contacted and said that they couldn’t make the time.”

Emails show Lum told the five student voting members of the board that they “wouldn’t need to attend” due to the meeting’s “unusual” nature, and that a “real meeting” of the board would be scheduled soon. This supposed “real meeting” never ended up taking place, and Bainbridge ended up being the only undergraduate voting member in attendance, along with one graduate student and two faculty members.

According to Bainbridge, Lum and other administrators almost immediately began peppering Olivares with personal attacks.

“He was interrupted and was called a liar, which is not appropriate behavior to have during a board meeting,” Bainbridge said. “He was able to provide information to us in a much more forthcoming way than the people who are making these allegations were doing.”

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Bainbridge was also disturbed by the lack of opportunities given to Olivares to respond to the allegations.

“He was initially held to just ten minutes to discuss and refute the allegations against him … And so he continued giving his statement, which was frequently interrupted by the student media administrators who were present to try to stop him from saying certain things or to refute his refutation.” 

To Bainbridge, the administrators failed to be impartial or fair throughout the discussions.

“It seems like no matter how well the editor-in-chief could refute the allegations that they brought against him, no matter how unfocused and unstructured those allegations were to begin with… It seems like it was a foregone conclusion,” Bainbridge said.

“At the end of the process, I felt sick.”

In the end, the board decided to remove Olivares in a 3-1 vote, with Bainbridge being the only “nay” vote.

Mercury staff organizes and charts new path

Before the vote, Managing Editor Maria Shaikh had pitched a bold contingency plan to the Mercury’s student management: A full-blown, staff-wide strike.

“I get unanimous consent from everyone. Friday meeting happens. He’s fired. Honestly, we’re all in shock. We all intrinsically know that something significant just happened,” Shaikh said. “Something really major has just died and we are now in a completely new paradigm. And honestly, I cried.” 

After the vote, Shaikh and the management team quickly met at a restaurant to game it out.

The students put out a public strike statement the next day on the Mercury’s website, as well as on all social media accounts. The strike statement receives over 1,200 signatures, and in the Sept. 16 black-out print issue, one page reads: “Want to read the rest of the Mercury? Bring our Editor-in-Chief back.”

The day after the issue’s release, Olivares sent his appeal to the board.

According to the bylaws, the appeal should have been heard by SMOB, with Director Huffenberger acting as a final tiebreaker if the board failed to come to a consensus. However, Gene Fitch, vice president of student affairs, approved of Huffenberger bypassing the board and allowing her to reject the appeal on her own.

On Oct. 10, student affairs fired all ten remaining members of the Mercury managing staff. This included Shaikh who, due to her position as interim editor-in-chief, should have triggered a separate SMOB vote, but did not.

The Mercury has not published anything since its strike edition in mid-September.

But Olivares, Shaikh, and the rest of the Mercury’s staff weren’t finished just yet. Together, they founded a new, nonprofit paper called the Retrograde, completely independent of the administration.

After being recognized by the UTD Student Government as the official school newspaper, they’ve been able to raise over $2,400 on GoFundMe, as well as gain additional grants and sponsorships to fuel development.

Through public information requests, the Retrograde says they’ve collected well over 500 pages of internal documents regarding the administration’s actions against the Mercury, which they plan to release in late January. 

And finally, after months of turbulence, Olivares is now editor-in-chief again.

“It felt really good … These people were willing to forsake the Mercury, willing to go and form a new student newspaper entirely from the ground up as a nonprofit,” he said. “And that’s a lot of commitment. That’s a lot of effort to put in as a student. So I really appreciated it.”

Texas Standard reached out to Student Media Director Lydia Lum, Senior Director Jenni Huffenberger, and Assistant Director Jonathan Stewart for comment on this story but did not receive a reply. Student Affairs Vice President Gene Fitch declined a request for comment.

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