Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, Tyler Crivella, Sherlyn Dominguez, The Retrograde (University of Texas at Dallas)

DESCRIPTION

In 2024, officials at the University of Texas at Dallas effectively shut down the campus newspaper, The Mercury, demoting and removing all student journalists at the publication. Top editor Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez and other ex-Mercury journalists then founded a new outlet, The Retrograde, to report independently on UTD. That history made The Retrograde’s reporting on UTD’s Title IX system all the more difficult. UTD officials declined reporters’ requests for interviews. Most of the women alleging Title IX violations would talk only on background, in part because the university required them to sign non-disclosure agreements. So Olivares Gutierrez, Dominguez, and Crivella turned to data, comparing UTD to three other large universities, including the University of Texas’s main campus at Austin. Complementing survivors’ accounts, the numbers showed that UTD lagged significantly behind the other universities, including UT Austin, in initiating cases and sanctioning alleged abusers.