April 23, 2025
Texas Student Journalists Are Being Censored, but That Won’t Stop the Presses
By Phoebe Grandi
On University of Texas campuses, students have found other ways of newsmaking that free their publications from editorial control by their schools and state.
In May of last year, Gregorio Olivares began his tenure as editor in chief of The Mercury, the University of Texas, Dallas’s student newspaper. By September, just four months later, Olivares was fired. Not long after, the rest of the managing staff was laid off and the entire paper ceased operation. It’s no surprise that Olivares describes the state of student journalism in Texas as a “flaming cauldron of chaos.”
His expulsion didn’t come out of nowhere. “This has been an ongoing issue that we’ve had with our campus administration since I joined the newspaper,” said Olivares, who is a second-year student studying political science and philosophy. Olivares began working for the paper in the fall of their freshman year, around the same time that UTD administration removed the Spirit Rocks—three rocks on campus that previously served as a public forum—after they were painted with pro-Palestinian imagery.
In December 2023, Olivares and others on The Mercury staff argued in an op-ed that “the removal of the rocks [set] a dangerous precedent for free expression on campus.” The Mercury op-ed decried the removal as cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech in particular: “[UTD] has allowed hot-button topics on the Spirit Rocks and platformed controversial groups like Turning Point USA, and yet it seems to draw the line following a progressive outpouring of support for human rights in Palestine.”
