Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez’ unfair removal from his position is a death knell for The Mercury 

Maria Shaikh, Kavya Racheeti, Paola Martinez, Aimee Morgan | Editorial Board

On Sept. 13, the Student Media Operating Board voted to remove Editor-in-Chief Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez from his position after three alleged violations of Student Media bylaws. These violations were presented to the board by current Student Media Adviser Lydia Lum. The Mercury’s management team believe that Olivares’s firing was done under petty stipulations, handled unprofessionally and above all else, signals The Mercury’s inevitable collapse. 

We, The Mercury’s management team, disagree with every violation Lum presented against Olivares in the meeting. The first violation Lum discussed was Olivares’ double stipend pay and perceived lack of communication around whether he was permitted to hold two stipend “student employee” positions. In addition to his position as editor-in-chief, Olivares is also a peer adviser under UTD Housing, a position he took on publicly after studying the Student Media bylaws and UTD policy on “student employee” vs. “student role” positions and consulting Jenni Huffenberger, senior director of marketing and student media, on how cross-departmental stipends worked. Huffenberger, who was interim director of student media at the time, did not tell Olivares that cross-departmental stipends were prohibited.  

Having worked with Olivares personally, we can attest to his rigorous attention to detail and consistently by-the-book decision making. When Olivares applied to be a peer adviser, he informed Mercury management that he studied UTD policy extensively and did not find a prohibition against it. During summer 2024 when Mercury management and Student Media administration conflicted over stipend policy, Olivares took it upon himself to study the relevant policies, communicate extensively with Huffenberger and determine what was and was not permissible financially. What Huffenberger suggested was Olivares intentionally obfuscating his double stipends is a dramatically incorrect interpretation of the situation and Olivares’ character. 

The second violation Lum discussed was that Olivares was overrunning the budget by ordering 2,600 print issues for the Sept. 03 edition of The Mercury. However, Olivares was not made aware there was a hard limit of 2,000 issues per cycle and was following the precedent set and taught by former Editor-in-Chief Fatimah Azeem and former Distribution Manager Andre Averion, who would print more physical issues in the beginning of the semester and between 1,000 and 1,500 issues near the end to respond to changing readership trends. Additionally, when Lum told him he had overrun the budget and thus had to limit the size and issue count of the ensuing two editions to recuperate costs, Olivares immediately complied. Mercury management attests that Olivares has been asking Lum repeatedly for access to The Mercury’s budget numbers, so he can make better-informed hiring and print purchasing decisions. Lum’s refusal to provide the numbers and Olivares’ ensuing mistake — if following precedent can be called a mistake — is not his fault. 

The final bylaw Lum discussed was that Olivares has made her job as The Mercury’s adviser impossible by not permitting her to attend every single Mercury meeting or letting her view Mercury content prior to publication. When Lum brought this concern up to Mercury management on Aug. 23, we immediately invited her to every meeting except our biweekly pitch meetings, even creating a new post-pitch meeting so Lum could understand the content we would be working on. Despite this — and despite Lum’s frequent interactions with Mercury members in the office, and Olivares’ regular meetings with Lum where he asked her for advice and acted on her suggestions — Lum said she was being shut out of The Mercury, and Huffenberger suggested Olivares was being belligerent toward or stonewalling Lum.  

Not only do we disagree with the validity of the violations that resulted in Olivares’ removal, we find the meeting was conducted incredibly unprofessionally. The tone used by SMOB members like Huffenberger and communications professor Janet Johnson toward Olivares felt nothing short of bullying. Huffenberger raised her voice at Olivares to call him a liar several times, while Johnson raised her voice and interrupted Olivares several times. In a board that includes professors and UTD administrators, it is ironic that the most professionalism shown in that meeting was from Avery Bainbridge, a student member of SMOB.  

This hostile behavior is not surprising, as Mercury has been dealing with pushback from UTD administration since our coverage of the May 1 encampment and arrests, including the demotion of our former adviser Jonathan Stewart, who Huffenberger and then Lum succeeded; Lum’s prohibition of Mercury members from attending student media conferences; removal of Mercury papers from kiosks; and Huffenberger’s unilateral restructuring of stipends that harmed multiple management members. While these things are not necessarily intentionally punitive, they have soured the relationship between Mercury and UTD administration — a relationship that Olivares has worked consistently to mend, to little avail. 

We disagree with the mean and pointed remarks made by SMOB attendees about Olivares’s character and any intentionality behind the violations — assuming, charitably, that enough evidence even exists to suggest a violation. While Olivares came to the meeting with proof — including messages, emails and recordings — of his compliance with UTD and Student Media policy, SMOB did not allot time to review any of the corroborating documents nor present proof he had committed a violation. If Olivares is expected to muster enough proof to prove his compliance, SMOB has effectively inaugurated a “guilty until proven innocent” model of governing Student Media, whereby any student media member can be challenged and dismissed unless they have carefully cataloged every example of their innocence. 

Olivares has, by all metrics, has been nothing but an excellent Editor-in-Chief in his short four-month tenure. Under his leadership, relationships with organizations on and off-campus, students, faculty members, Student Government and others are the best they have been in living memory. Our print and digital outreach and reader engagement statistics have shattered our previous records. The Mercury’s current management team is the most functional and effective team in living memory, and internal operations are smoother than ever thanks to the sweeping organizational reforms he spearheaded. His dismissal makes it clear that despite management and staff’s overwhelming support and love for Olivares, SMOB values punishing perceived insubordination more than rewarding revolutionary successes. 

Olivares’ removal indicates The Mercury is in a death spiral — that the publication’s collapse or defanging into irrelevance is inevitable. During the Sept. 13 meeting, Johnson asked several questions with dangerous implications. When discussing Olivares’ employment as a PA with Housing as well as editor-in-chief, she derisively asked him whether he had explicitly asked Huffenberger if he could seek employment at Housing. Olivares’ actual conversation with Huffenberger, where he asked about cross-departmental employment and the specific wording of UTD’s student employment policies, did not satisfy Johnson despite being a perfectly reasonable way to learn whether he could take a position with Housing or not. Johnson then insisted Olivares should have spoken explicitly with Lum about ordering more than 2,000 issues per cycle despite the established precedent under Azeem and Averion — a precedent Olivares was trained in and had no reason to question until now. Johnson’s insistence on hyper-specific conversations suggests that the Editor-in-Chief must painstakingly clear every decision by the adviser or they can be punished for a bylaw violation, and that acting according to precedent or general direction is impermissible. More broadly, SMOB’s decision to remove Gregorio establishes the draconian precedent that any bylaw violation — no matter how innocent, accidental, easily remedied or ill-defined — demands immediate removal instead of an opportunity for remediation based on a mere suggestion from the alleger, not proof. 

The Mercury is not alone in facing administrative pressure. Student leaders and advisers whose publications criticize their university, or even cover frivolous topics that still paint the university in a poor light, face various forms of attack. Publications attempting to cover the nationwide wave of political campus protests, including UTD’s own May 1 encampment, have received police and administrative stonewalling in what the Freedom of the Press Foundation said is an attack on press freedom. The Mercury has similarly faced silence from administration, forcing us to crowdfund $3,000 for communications and comments from campus administrators about May 1, as well as more punitive measures like the demotion of our former adviser, Jonathan Stewart, after our May 20 print publication.  Once an editor-in-chief is removed — especially on flimsy reasoning and as part of a broader pattern of administrative repression against student journalists, as with Olivares — no subsequent editor-in-chief is safe. They can either bow down to administration’s wishes, which include throttling investigations, coverage of activism and free expression, or find themselves similarly deposed for nebulous violations with no meaningful opportunity to redeem themselves. Management and staff members’ confidence in creating what they want erodes, leading to self-censorship and milquetoast, forgettable content. The surrounding community’s trust in the publication’s truthfulness and independence wanes, leading to declining readership and hostility toward student interviewers and investigators. After doggedly rebuilding our relationships throughout the UTD community, The Mercury refuses to submit to a lonely, insecure, useless fate. 

The Mercury’s management team and all co-signatories of our strike statement demand the following: 

1. For Olivares’ immediate reinstatement as Editor-in-Chief. 
2. For SMOB to amend its procedures so that anyone in violation of a Student Media bylaw is given an opportunity for remediation instead of immediate dismissal.
3. For the Editor-in-Chief position at The Mercury to be democratically elected by official Mercury members rather than appointed by SMOB.

If SMOB does not meet these demands, The Mercury will cease publication after the Sept. 16 issue and seek to create a new, online-only publication independent of administrative oversight to continue our mission of serving news to the UTD community. 

To support our strike, become a co-signatory at tinyurl.com/mercurystrike and demand Olivares’ reinstatement by sending a complaint to editor@utdmercury.com.