The Texas Student Publications board approved a new agreement Friday outlining the relationship between the board and the UT System Board of Regents and leaving the issue of prior review open to future interpretation.
The agreement replaces a 35-year-old Declaration of Trust, a document considered to be outdated by TSP board members and regents. In a previous draft agreement created in November by the UT System Board of Regents' attorneys, the UT System upheld prior review. That document was rejected by the TSP Board of Operating Trustees, which oversees UT student media.
The re-vamping of the agreement has been aimed at the elimination of prior review, the practice in which a legal adviser hired by TSP must read all Daily Texan material before publication. This process leaves open the possibility of censorship prior to publication, although this has never been attempted by a Daily Texan adviser or the University in the Declaration of Trust's lifetime. The new agreement neither mandates nor eliminates this prior review.
"A lot of this document has to do with indemnification and putting a wall between the liability issues that we would incur and the regents," said Rusty Todd, chairman of the TSP board's executive committee.
The approved agreement holds the TSP board liable for itself, while ownership of all TSP assets belongs to the UT System. Since liability belongs to the TSP board, members must now outline its controls, protections and procedures, including addressing prior review, in a separate agreement.
The UT System Board of Regents must first approve the new agreement.
While many TSP board members viewed the new agreement as a step in the right direction, at-large student TSP board member Brian Ferguson said there's a reason why the agreement does not specifically address prior review - the regents' attorneys do not want to get rid of it.
"If they wanted to get rid of prior review, they'd say, 'We're getting rid of prior review,'" Ferguson said to fellow board members at the TSP board meeting Friday. "But they won't say that, and there is a reason they won't say that - because it's not going to happen."
Most board members disagreed. Todd said the new agreement would give the TSP board the flexibility to diminish the role of the legal adviser in the prior review of all content.
"Let me just suggest that we stop being afraid, and we get this past us, and we go do good journalism," Todd said
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