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Less than a year after dismantling its student newspaper staff, the University of Texas at Dallas has recently taken yet another hostile step toward limiting the media available to its students. Just in time for the fall semester, UT Dallas has banned newsstands, something that students have used for decades. The drastic move leaves us asking why the school would go through the effort of quietly removing nearly every single news rack on campus.
When pressed for information, the university administration made vague gestures at policy reviews and proposals to come at a later date. And it isn’t just the student newspapers under fire anymore; UT Dallas has extended its ban to all racks. No notice was given prior to the removal, and no public explanation has been announced. Another unilateral decision by an administration that has spent the past two years dismantling every forum for dissent and discourse on campus, from the Spirit Rocks to The Mercury newspaper, while insisting it values the First Amendment and the rights of its students and the public at large.
Like any good college student with too much time on their hands, we reached out to campus administration about the vanishing news racks. UT Dallas Vice President and Chief of Staff Rafael Martín agreed with me that since UT Dallas did not have a policy regulating news racks, UT system policy would instead be enforced. The UT system rule, which regulates newsracks on UT system campuses, effectively allows them in any designated spaces on campus. UT Dallas could choose to have zero news racks or stands on its campus by removing all designated spaces, but the policy does not allow for UT Dallas to keep some racks while removing others. However, Martín specifically did not say that Rule 80103 would be enforced; instead, he said Vice President of Student Affairs Gene Fitch would be tasked with creating a policy proposal for the new President Prabhas Moghe to review.
Rather than follow the UT system rules, UT Dallas’ administration is opting to find its own loophole wherein they can blanket ban all news racks from campus while they consider and study the issue with the end goal of making some sort of proposal to Moghe. What a clever way to get around following inconvenient UT system rules. This death by bureaucratic delay and procedure is the same playbook that will execute UT Dallas’ academic senate on September 1. Given the whole summer to prepare for the effects of SB 37, UT Dallas and the UT system did nothing about the impending destruction of a core part of the system of academic governance present across nearly all U.S. universities.
UT Dallas administration is adamant that they are not censoring free speech, but instead “always supported student journalists’ editorial control and wants to create an environment where they can learn best journalistic practices.” But let’s be completely clear: this is censorship disguised as procedure. The racks and papers were not removed because they were clutter or junk; they are lifelines for student information. A student newspaper gives students access to the events and life on campus. A local newspaper gives students, many of whom come from not only outside of the state but outside the country, an insight into interesting local events, shops, and experiences. That crucial lifeline has now been banned in the last weeks leading up to the fall semester. Newspapers that have provided coverage of UT Dallas’ many, many scandals in the past two years are now not welcome on campus, at least not physically. The sweeping ban just adds on to the previous mass removal of stands when 42 of The Mercury’s 43 news racks were removed from campus in January of this year.
While one might argue that print copies of newspapers on campus are unnecessary in a world with easily accessible online news, this stems from a misconception about the print and digital audiences of newspapers. In the past decade, research has shown that the lack of a physical presence in an online-only environment serves as the death knell for independent and local papers whose total readership dramatically drops off when physical readers simply don’t make the jump to digital, it eliminates the experience of engaging with a paper as a whole, and it can lead to diminished audience attention since they can immediately jump to the most interesting story from the biggest publications while never learning about the rest of what would otherwise be contained in a newspaper. Killing news racks on the UT Dallas campus makes information inaccessible to students unless they go out of their way to find information from local media sources, another task college students would rather avoid when they have classes and exams to get to.
Martín said that because Fitch oversees Student Media, he will be tasked as the point person for rack policy development. A look at Fitch’s record as Student Affairs vice president speaks for itself. In 2023, Fitch’s office ordered the removal of the Spirit Rocks from campus, a decades-old public forum for both art and debate (this happened on the first day of Thanksgiving Break, excellent timing to remove a foundation of campus culture when students are all gone). In Spring 2024, Fitch’s office and subordinates oversaw the raid of the May 1 UT Dallas encampment, which led to the arrest of 21 students, faculty, alumni, and other protesters.
When UT Dallas lacked the policy it wanted to use to punish these students, Student Affairs made new “guidelines” within 48 hours of the arrest and told the students that these guidelines remained unchanged from what they had always been. Public records obtained by The Retrograde last fall revealed email chains in which Student Affairs leadership directly changed the guidelines in real time for good old-fashioned ex post facto policy enforcement. In Fall 2024, Fitch oversaw the destruction of the more than 40-year-old Mercury student newspaper through the mass firing of its staff. In Spring 2025, on top of removing The Mercury’s stand, a senior member of student affairs told students tabling and drawing in the center of campus that the university’s “policy supersedes your First Amendment”. Fall 2025 is starting off strong with the ban on all newspaper stands and Fitch’s policy review.
With the Academic Senate set to be abolished within the next few weeks, one of the few oversight bodies on administration will entirely disappear unless UT Dallas administration finds a way to cut through the bureaucracy and implement multiple new remedial and interim policies to perform the functions the soon-to-be defunct senate once did. Fitch gets free rein to “recommend” whether news racks return. Given his history, it’s reasonable to expect one of two outcomes: an insubstantial “compromise” (e.g., each newspaper gets one rack hidden in Green Hall vestibule) or simply a permanent ban on newspaper stands because of the threat news poses to the campus culture as the administration sees it.
As a great act of charity, Martín said that The Mercury (which has had only one rack and has not published anything in the past ten months) and the student satire magazine, A Modest Proposal, may continue to operate racks on campus. School rules say that the UT Dallas President has the ability to designate areas for news racks; however, it does not say that UT Dallas gets to arbitrarily discriminate between who can and cannot use those areas for the distribution of newspapers, magazines, or other publications.
When the founders of Texas Instruments decided they wanted to have their own university back in the 1960s and founded what is today UT Dallas, they wanted to create a school that could rival MIT. Instead, UT Dallas has become a case study in repression. A school that regularly attacks journalists for sport, lets shared governance die with nothing more than a whimper, hides behind prolonged reviews of policy and procedure, brings in state troopers to violently raid peaceful anti-genocide protests, and creates circumstances in which professors sue the school because of the physical and psychological trauma they endured thanks to decisions made by campus administrators.
If you are a UT Dallas alumnus who donates money to the school, consider withholding donations until a commitment to these basic rights of students, faculty, and staff on campus is made and actually enforced. The UT Regents have the clearest path here: intervene. UT Dallas is attempting to set the precedent that Regents’ rules can just be suspended on a whim because administrators felt they needed to make their own special policy.
UT Dallas’s actions are not those of an institution with diligent stewards; they are those of an erratic fundraising scheme that is practically begging to be sued for violations of the First Amendment. President Moghe has a choice: reverse the ban or cement UT Dallas’s already spiraling reputation as a campus where information and the opportunities of its students go to die.
