Student journalist sues Texas university after firing and suspension

The editor-in-chief of the University of Texas at Dallas student newspaper, The Mercury, was removed from his post on Sept. 13, 2024, and received a deferred two-year suspension for adding an editorial note calling into question factual assertions in a letter to the editor. He later filed suit against the school.

In July 2024, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez received a letter to the editor from a student about antisemitism on campus. Gutierrez told the student some of the letter’s claims needed citations and revisions. The student rejected the changes, and Gutierrez published the letter as-is in August, but added an editor’s note.

“The presentation of opinion as fact within this article, despite repeated requests to address the issue, does not meet the journalistic standards of The Mercury,” the note read in part.

The student author filed a discrimination complaint against Gutierrez the next day with the university’s Office of Institutional Compliance, launching a multiyear investigation.

Gutierrez was also fired as editor-in-chief of the paper in September 2024, prompting some student journalists to go on strike. He and his former staff eventually established an independent outlet, The Retrograde.

In November 2025, investigators concluded that Gutierrez had indeed engaged in discrimination against the student author, and imposed a deferred two-year suspension and required him to take courses in nondiscrimination and media ethics.

When the campus free speech nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression caught wind of the case, it pressured the university to reconsider. Instead, the school set up a panel hearing in February 2026, which reached the same conclusions and imposed the same punishment, in addition to Gutierrez having to submit a reflective paper.

In a federal suit filed on Sept. 16, 2026, Gutierrez’s lawyers allege that the university violated his First Amendment rights by seizing on the discrimination complaint as a “pretext to silence Gutierrez,” who had over the years become “a persistent thorn in UTD’s side” for his critical reporting on the university.

Lawyers from FIRE, which represents Gutierrez, emphasized that the inclusion of the editor’s note was “protected expression under the First Amendment” and that Gutierrez’s constitutional rights were violated when he was punished. Of the suspension, they said it “hung a sword of Damocles over Gutierrez’s head—a threat designed to chill him into silence for the rest of his time at UTD.”

According to multiple media reports, the university declined to respond to requests for comments, citing pending litigation.