One Battle After Another

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez went to the University of Texas at Dallas to study political science and government, not journalism. But during his freshman year, in 2023, he joined the university’s student paper, The Mercury, after reading a story in it about a graduate student who’d tortured cats.

“What first pulled me in was, ‘Oh my god, this is a cute cat, let me see what the story is about,’” Olivares Gutierrez said. “And then I read some really riveting journalism that told me a lot of things I would never have expected about the campus.”

Olivares Gutierrez started working with The Mercury a month later. The next year, he was appointed editor in chief. He covered a host of issues, including the presence of sex offenders on campus, a Halloween accident wherein a Tesla drove through a student apartment, and pro-Palestine protests on campus. The protests proved to be a point of conflict between the paper and the university. The Mercury published several stories criticizing the university for calling in state troopers to student encampments and ran interviews with protesters who were arrested; soon after, administrators accused Olivares Gutierrez of committing “journalism malpractice” and replaced The Mercury’s adviser. Olivares Gutierrez also said the university attempted to remove issues of the paper that included an editorial about a student’s suicide from kiosks around the school.

In September of 2024, the school’s administration fired Olivares Gutierrez. The Mercury’s entire staff subsequently went on strike, and members of its management team were fired as well. They started a new paper called The Retrograde with Olivares Gutierrez as editor in chief, independent of The Mercury and the university. It currently has a volunteer staff of fifty-two people and is primarily funded by donations through GoFundMe and Patreon, plus some ad sales.

In response to a request for comment, the University of Texas at Dallas wrote in an email to CJR, “The former editor’s characterization of past events is not accurate. UT Dallas has consistently supported student journalists’ editorial control and wants to create an environment where they can learn best journalistic practices.”

In recent months, the tensions between student media and universities have come to a head at several college campuses, making national headlines and raising concerns about the state of press freedom for student journalists in the United States. When Olivares Gutierrez attended Media Fest, a conference for student journalists, in October, it was buzzing with news from the day before: Indiana University had fired Jim Rodenbush, the adviser for the Indiana Daily Student (IDS), after he refused to comply with an order to keep news stories out of the homecoming edition. The paper’s print edition was also discontinued. Within days, Purdue’s The Exponent, a rival newspaper, distributed three thousand copies of a special edition printed in solidarity with IDS, and the following week, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) sent a letter to Indiana University to condemn what it deemed the university’s “censorship” of student journalism.

The tensions at IDS became a national story. Journalists at the New York Times, NPR, and the AP covered it, and in the weeks that followed, alumni pulled more than a million dollars in funding. Three weeks later, the university reinstated the IDS’s print edition. In a letter to the editors of the paper, University chancellor David Reingold said the decision had nothing to do with editorial content and that he recognized and accepted that “the campus has not handled recent decisions as well as we should have. Communication was uneven and timing imperfect.”

“We view this as a huge positive step,” Eric Feder, the director of the Local Legal Initiative at RCFP, told CJR. “I mean that the university saw the backlash that was happening, we sent a letter laying out all of the constitutional problems, and they now seem to have backed down. And I think that was absolutely the right decision.” 

Around the country, many student journalists are still facing similar problems. That includes Olivia Mapes, editor in chief of The Exponent. In June, Purdue announced that it would no longer distribute copies of the paper on campus and that the Purdue Student Publishing Foundation had “no license to the Purdue name for commercial use.” (As justification, Purdue only cited its policy on “institutional neutrality.”) In October, the University of Central Oklahoma stopped printing The Vista, sparking censorship claims. According to a letter filed by the RCFP, the move came after the university “repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with editorial decisions” made by The Vista, including news that “may reflect poorly” on the university and its president, Todd Lamb. The stories in question covered efforts to install Narcan vending machines on campus, the university’s handling of a student’s suicide in 2024, and the Student Associaton’s failed vote of confidence in Lamb prior to his official inauguration. “It’s not even about student media at this point,” Mapes said. “It’s about censorship of the news in general.” 

The RCFP and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) both condemned the university’s actions. In FIRE’s letter to Lamb, Dominic Coletti, the program leader for the organization’s Student Press Freedom Initiative, wrote: “There is no doubt that the viewpoints Vista writers expressed led to the print ban. You made the university’s position clear when you suggested the paper stop reporting on ‘broken eggs.’” The letter also said that The Vista’s adviser and administrator demoted, fired, and refused to hire staff members who spoke out against the print ban, and that they indicated that the print ban could be lifted if The Vista changed the tone of its coverage. 

As with The Mercury, some University of Central Oklahoma student journalists branched out last month to create their own independent paper, called the Independent View. Kenna Attaway, who is still the editor in chief of The Vista, told CJR that the decision was financial and that claims of censorship are based on a misunderstanding of the situation. But Andrew Frazier, the Independent View’s editor in chief, pushed back on this, saying that the university turned down offers to use funds from alumni donations to keep The Vista’s print edition going. One of these donors is now the main contributor to the funding of the Independent View’s print edition. 

“The Vista, UCO’s official student newspaper, continues to independently publish online and maintains editorial freedom over its content. Thus, there is no censorship,” Adrienne Nobles, the university’s vice president for communications and public affairs, said in a statement to CJR. “The university general counsel’s review found no evidence to support accusations of retaliation against students, faculty, or staff. Simply put, the allegations outlined in the letters are without merit.” 

“The reality is a university, as a general matter, is of course subject to the First Amendment,” Feder said. “There’s long-standing case law going back decades that says that when a university opens a student newspaper for purposes of free expression, or free news reporting by students, then the university can’t come around and say, ‘No, we don’t like what you wrote,’ and control the content.” 

Some campus papers are contending with censorship pressure from the government. Earlier this year, FIRE filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on behalf of the Stanford Daily and two “legal noncitizens with no criminal record who engaged in pro-Palestinian speech and now fear deportation and visa revocation because of their expression.” A letter from the editors explained that “the suit challenges two federal immigration laws that allow the government to revoke non–US citizens’ visas for protected speech, including speech in student papers.”

International students in particular face newfound risks that come with having their byline on an article. Jonathan Gaston-Falk, an education attorney at the Student Press Law Center, said that student newsrooms on different campuses have strongly suggested that international students not work on particular issues. Some newsrooms have gone through their backlogs and hidden certain posts. 

“You’re seeing a reduction in the amount of speech that’s happening on campus. You have international students, for completely understandable reasons, who are just not speaking at all,” FIRE’s Coletti told CJR. “While that’s true across the country, it’s particularly pernicious at colleges and universities, where students are supposed to be able to interrogate and challenge the status quo, norms, and societal expectations in the pursuit of truth.”

For now, student journalists must come up with creative ways to work around the free speech restrictions and protect their colleagues. Last week, Olivares Gutierrez and his colleague Surjaditya Sarkar published a piece in The Retrograde outlining what international students should know about their rights and visas. It came with an editor’s note: “The Retrograde has granted sources’ requests for anonymity in this article because of the possibility of retaliation from the US government.”