Category: Opinion

  • Why we stand for the victims

    Last Tuesday, Comets for the Preborn, a campus organization, displayed graphic photos of aborted preborn children outside the Student Union. Our signs bore genuine pictures — neither staged nor photoshopped — of babies aborted within the first six to 20 weeks of life. The accuracy and authenticity of each photo were personally verified by both…

  • Letter to the Editor: How to help ATEC grads improve job prospects

    It’s easy to help make ATEC a better experience for its undergraduate students: Just require a minor (18 credit hours) in the STEM field of their choice. The interests and abilities that UTD ATEC students have for animating and visualizing complex STEM processes are badly needed in NS&M, ECS and BBS.  For an example of…

  • Voting close to home

    Ask anyone to name the president of the United States and you would easily get laughs at how obvious the answer is. Ask anyone to name their city councilor or school board trustee and you would probably get blank stares. Some may not even know what a city councilor is — or does. Yet cities…

  • The Price of Interference

    Why US Intervention in Venezuelan politics promotes imperialism Juan Guaido, who did not receive a single vote in Venezuela’s elections, swore himself in as president of Venezuela on Jan. 23. Guaido’s declaration follows the controversial elections in May 2018. The elections were originally scheduled for December but were pushed up to May. In response, United…

  • Letter to the Editor: Recent op-ed inconsistent with position on open discourse

    I organized and supervised the Steven Crowder event on Jan. 22 and thought it went quite well. Outside of a couple of protestors, I think a lot of students would agree with me. One such protestor was Nicholas Provenghi, who wrote an op-ed in the Jan. 28 issue of The Mercury titled “Steven Crowder harms…

  • My biggest regret

    I haven’t always made the best choices in my time here at UTD. Like most of us, if I could talk to myself when I was a freshman, there’s a lot of different pieces of advice I’d tell younger Fawaz. “Go to class, you fool. Stop eating Taco Bell so much. At least pretend to…

  • To form a more perfect union

    As Americans, we often claim to love democracy while simultaneously not practicing it in one of the most important parts of our lives — our workplace. In some cases, bosses can exercise almost autocratic control over our working lives with few checks on their power. Some on-campus employees know this better than most. Employees of…

  • Letter to the Editor: Previous op-ed supporting border wall misconstrues facts

    In the Jan. 28 issue of The Mercury, an op-ed by Alexander Christie — entitled “Shutdown at the D.C. Corral” — asserted that the recent partial government closure was necessary to reexamine the issue of border security. This, among other parts of the article, is categorically false. If the shutdown was meant to heighten the…

  • Academic scandal highlights need for improved transparency

    The recent controversy surrounding the Justice Administration and Leadership program came to light in a Feb. 3 report by The Dallas Morning News, in which transfer students in a criminology master’s program were awarded A’s for classes they did not attend. There still remain unanswered questions. However, The News took things a step further by…

  • Shutdown at the D.C. corral

    During the Trump presidency, Americans have seen many records broken. We’ve broken all sorts of stock market records. No president has had more federal judicial appointments than President Trump at this point in his presidency. Now, we’ve had the longest government shutdown. However, the term “government shutdown” is a purely bureaucratic term. What has occurred…