UT-Dallas fails (so far) to censor pro-Palestinian students and newspaper

Pro-Palestinian journo students at UT-Dallas, who went on strike after administration sacked their editor, Gregorio Olivares Guiterrez, last year over pro-Palestinian protest issues, have officially not only abandoned the official student newspaper but started a competitor. (This will be something that Kuff has nothing about, of course, unless it's in his friend's "Dispatches from Dallas." After all, he never wrote about UT-Dallas' prez Richard Benson, or Jay Hartzell running the Tea Sipping flagship in Austin calling in state troopers to attack those protestors.) 

I was originally going to run this as part of this week's Texas Progressives roundup, but it needs its own pull-out.

The piece goes on to note that Benson refused to talk to staff at the official student newspaper, before sacking Olivares Guiterrez, or be officially interviewed for any stories, then had his staff accuse the Mercury staff of "journalistic malpractice" after they extracted words of his from a Morning Snooze op-ed since he refused to be interviewed by the Mercury.

The Mercury staff published multiple stories that questioned whether UT-Dallas should have brought state troopers in to dismantle an encampment and arrest 21 people on May 1. The Mercury reported the university did not respond to numerous requests for comment, so they included some of what Benson wrote about the incident in an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News.

Benson said UT-Dallas “staunchly protects the rights of free speech and free assembly,” but had to call law enforcement after it became clear the protesters would not comply with a request to move or disassemble the encampment, which was impeding faculty, staff and students from their daily tasks.

“It is important to note that no one was arrested for being a protester,” he said.

One of the Mercury’s top stories was an interview with an art history professor who was arrested. It garnered more than 100 comments online, most of them critical of the university and Benson.

Olivares Gutierrez said after publication, an administrator called him and then-Mercury managing editor Maria Shaikh into a meeting. That administrator told them they had committed “journalism malpractice,” but wouldn’t explain how.

Behind all this?

Here's the keystone:

Courts have repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment forbids college administrators from censoring or taking adverse action against student publications unless they can show a story would lead to a violent disruption in the educational environment or is obscene, libelous or invades someone’s privacy.

Some states have built upon those rights, enacting laws to protect college student journalists from censorship and advisers from retaliation for refusing to censor them. Texas is not one of them, and this is a time when student journalists are under pressure the likes of which have not been seen since the Vietnam War. Some who have covered protests to the Israel-Hamas war have been expelled and arrested in the past year, said Jonathan Gaston Falk, a staff attorney at the Student Press Law Center.

Yeah.