It’s the Office of Student Affairs.

Really, there’s a lot of scary things to think about going into this Halloween season. Aside from whatever ghouls or midterms everyone’s dealing with beneath Berkner or in the walls of the res halls, we’re still fast approaching the first presidential election with an actual convicted criminal, and — more pertinently to us here at UTD — our student newspaper is dead. Or, at the very least, they are striking without strong hopes of returning. After a staggering series of violated student media bylaws and cold shoulders, Student Affairs has, through an illegal meeting of the Student Media Operating Board, swiftly and messily slaughtered our sister publication, The Mercury, by firing former Editor-in-Chief Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez. 

Our own Editor-in-Chief has been wading through the bylaws and all their vague legal jargon, and if you ask us, it’s kinda fucked! This isn’t what any of us signed up for — we just wanted to rant about Yakuza and say funny things for pitiful amounts of money that all the rest of campus can see on glossy little pages. But when it comes down to the punitive censure of students’ free speech on campus, you better believe us when we say this is not going away, and we’ll scan those goddamn bylaws as much as we need to in order to uphold the student voice. And then, who knows, maybe we’ll get axed too.

To that end, we stand with The Retrograde — the new publication rising from The Mercury’s ashes — and we recommend you check them out at @retrograde_news on Instagram. And remember, kids: firing the head of an organization calling out your pattern of consistent censorship of students relating to protests surrounding your support of Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza is, perhaps, a little uncool! And, if you happen to be dabbling in a teensy-weensy little bit of that, we hope you find a way to sleep well at night. 

(Just kidding! We don’t care.)

That’s enough proselytizing for us. We wish you all luck going into the second half of the semester, and we want you all to know you’re super-duper cool and also that there is, in fact, a shower in ECS West. 

That’s real. That exists. 

Just throwing that out there.