One Battle After Another

On university campuses, student papers are fighting their own administration—and sometimes the government—for the right to report.

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. (The University of Texas at Dallas did not respond to a request for comment.)