An Interview with Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez of The Retrograde

By William Schwartz >>

In late January, the University of Texas at Dallas removed its newspaper stands in an effort to kill The Mercury, the university’s student newspaper following protracted attempts to attack the newspaper’s editorial line by removing its editor-in-chief, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez. The Mercury is back, in a sense. It’s now known as The Retrograde. Gutierrez talked to Gateway Journalism Review about what happened then, what’s happening and what’s to be done going forward.

William Schwartz: How did this all get started? What was the first article administrators complained to you about? Or was it less one specific article, or just your tone in general that upset them?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I honestly wish this had all started with me taking on the mantle of Editor-in-Chief on May 1 since that would make telling this story shorter, but in all honesty, the issues we have had with campus administration have existed since I joined the publication. The first article I remember administrators being upset with was our “Bring our rocks back!” editorial covering the removal of the campus spirit rocks, which were a public forum of student expression. After this came out, a lot of offices stopped talking to us, unless the office of communications was in charge of providing the statement to us. I saw the first removal of newspapers from kiosks in response to our suicide awareness and support editorial “In the wake of death.” And of course, everything rapidly began escalating after our May 20 issue, which covered the student encampment on campus and subsequent violent raid of it. I would attribute their aggression towards us as a response to our insistence on investigative journalism and accountability on campus.

WS: When the initial attempts to pressure you didn’t work, how did they first try to escalate?

GOC: Our advisor was demoted on May 22 and in his place the university appointed PR professional Jenni Huffenberger to serve as our interim advisor and senior director of student media. In our first meeting with Huffenberger, she said that our work was journalistic malpractice, and then she refused to elaborate when we asked for specifics. Over the summer, they eventually appointed Lydia Lum to be our official advisor, and she would eventually organize my removal at the behest of our office of student affairs’ upper administration. After they were done with Lum they fired her too. When my staff went on strike, the campus administration fired all of them.

WS: What did you do in response to this escalation?

GOC: At first, we tried to compromise and meet them in good faith to find some working solution to this tension, but after they fired all of us the illusion of a happy solution to this fiasco was utterly shattered. In response to that we formed The Retrograde as its own independent non-profit entity to keep doing what The Mercury would have done had our administration not fired every single member of the organization.

WS: How was the rest of the staff at The Mercury taking all of this?

GOC: A lot of the staff was emotionally distraught when everything first blew up in September of last year, but we have since moved on and created our own identity in spite of campus administration. I think we all took this attack against student free speech and the freedom of the press surprisingly well since we have all agreed to stand up for ourselves with no intent roll over anytime soon.

WS: What do you think the point of no return was, in terms of actions taken by the university against you?

GOC: When they fired me they still had the chance of undoing their decision through a clear appeal process, but the moment the office of student affairs said they would be ignoring this process in its entirety and just making its own unilateral decision, we knew that there was no going back. Student affairs did not even care about the rules that it was required to operate under according to university policy and state law. It was ridiculous, petty, and entirely unprofessional. When that happened we agreed to make The Retrograde, so the mass firing of all staff later that month wasn’t a huge blow since we had all already given up on the idea of The Mercury ending its strike.

WS: How did you come to decide that relaunching The Mercury as The Retrograde as being the only realistic path going forward?

GOC: It was really our internalization of the idea that student affairs had zero interest in supporting us or defending student expression. Why would we want to crawl back to the office that had repeatedly abused us and overstepped its power. The office that had created an actively hostile work environment for us as students because we dared to ask questions about what was going on at the school we pay to attend. All the skill it took to make The Mercury rested with us, so we knew that we could do everything we needed to do without them.

WS: How are you distributing your paper now that you don’t have newspaper stands?

GOC: We just leave the paper in magazine kiosks on campus operated by our sister publication A Modest Proposal (UTD’s opinion and satire magazine), distribute it by hand, and leave it in public areas. As a public university, UTD can’t legally do much about our newspapers when we hand them out or leave them in sanctioned news zones.

WS: What’s your funding situation like?

GOC: Our funding situation is bad but workable. It doesn’t take much to operate our website for a year, and we all work as volunteers. The majority of our fundraising money has gone towards filing costs and franchise taxes now that we are a nonprofit entity in Texas while working towards getting 501(c)(3) status on the federal level, something that has been severely slowed down by the mass firing of IRS agents. Our print schedule went from every two weeks to maybe once a month based on how many ads we can scrounge together to fund our print runs.

WS: Are there any stories you’ve broken via The Retrograde that you’re particularly proud of?

GOC: The work I am most proud of was my May 1 coverage that happened under The Mercury and ended up getting me fired from my role as Editor-in-Chief. I don’t do as many articles at The Retrograde since I have had to transition to more administrative work and support to keep us legally viable, but here are some of my articles that I liked breaking:

All this for a lame party– We covered an incident of transphobia at a frat party

They quit: Student Affairs fires mercury management for striking– It is always fun to call out our administration when they misinform

Public Records– We fundraised $3,000 for this piece which is the first part of a series as we get more records

Students shouldn’t be scared of their campus administrators. As student journalists it ought to be our goal to promote accountability and transparency on our campuses even if campus administrators would rather shut that down or censor those efforts. UTD did the worst possible thing they could do to us: they shut down our paper and fired all of our staff. And yet we have continued to thrive and have only become more involved with our community thanks to the support of students, staff, and faculty. And of course, thanks to the support of groups like the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, the Student Press Law Center, and the Society of Professional Journalists. There are people who will support you if things like this occur, so student journalists shouldn’t be afraid to stand up to overzealous bureaucrats on a power trip.

William Schwartz is the social media manager for the Gateway Journalism Review

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