
Happy Holidays, Comets!
First thing’s first: how the hell did he get elected again? What went wrong? The man has 34 felony convictions and the complexion of a sweet potato. He appointed Dr. fucking Oz to his cabinet. He has been diametrically opposed to every form of civil rights for years. What did we do to deserve this? Does God exist? Does He hate us?
Now the fun stuff. You remember our last issue? The one with all the fun and lighthearted comments about how UTD admin should go suck a dick? The name Lydia Lum, Student Media Advisor, might come to mind as one of the big problem people for the current state of Student Media, what with The Mercury still being dead and all. Well, good news! She turned coat out of NOWHERE, seeking to amend her mistakes and support students’ free speech, like ours and yours!
And then she was fired just as suddenly. Such unfortunate and entirely unrelated happenstance, surely. Not even remotely correlated, even a little bit.
Lum’s firing also happened to coincide with the shutdown of a meeting she was planning to hold with the Student Media Operating Board to address flaws in the bylaws and increase protections for students. Now, there is a committee formed by Student Government to do this as well, begging the question: “Well what about the Student Media Bylaws ad hoc committee? Aren’t they supposed to address the issues? Why not wait for them?” Well, you’ll be glad to hear that admin representatives on the committee have put forth a recommendation for a new set of bylaws! And within them, you’ll find:
- More faculty and fewer students presiding over Student Media
- Requirement of prior review (which encourages students to self-censor)
- Capacity for immediate suspension without remediation of Student Media leadership on a whim
- Appeals decided entirely by the Vice President of Student Affairs instead of through the advisory board, like the current bylaws
- The advisory board’s name is being changed to SMAC (a little on the nose, perhaps?)
So you’ll perhaps forgive us if we don’t have the most trust in how the revisions process is currently going. Current protections for Student Media are waaaay below par compared to what other universities have, and new revisions like those proposed above would only exacerbate that. You as UTD students deserve to have press that can freely represent your concerns and issues, and admin just fucking hates that as far as we can tell. We’ll be publishing more on this in the spring, don’t you worry.
Anyway. Have a winter break, Comets!
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