The vanishing Vista
After the University of Central Oklahoma silenced the school paper, students got loud
When she was 10, Ella Spurlock spent her free time making little booklets for her grandparents — drawing and coloring short, stapled stories about flowers, her dog, or whatever caught her eye that week. “I would staple them and give them to my Nana and Pop,” she remembers. “I liked making something that lasted.”
A decade later, in her freshman year at the University of Central Oklahoma, she found an adult version of that ritual: a byline. Her first story for The Vista, a feature on an art gallery show, ran on a Wednesday. She knew the issue was out before class ended. She sprinted from the Liberal Arts Building to the nearest news rack, slid a copy free, and saw her name there in the ink. The Vista, founded in 1903, is Oklahoma’s oldest student newspaper, an abiding symbol of a free press on campus — and now Spurlock was part of that history.
“I sent a picture to my dad and grandparents,” she says. “Then I showed it to my roommate. I was so excited — just over the moon.”
She folded the paper and carried it all day, the same way she had with those prized booklets years ago.
That memory has since taken on a strange weight. The very spring after her first story in The Vista, UCO administrators began discussing a “digital transition,” foreshadowing the end of the paper’s print edition. They said it was about the budget. But Spurlock suspected more. Administrators at UCO had voiced their displeasure with the paper’s investigative work before.
Print funding supposedly hinged on votes that administrators didn’t control. In May 2025, the Student Media Advisory Board met and voted unanimously to fund The Vista and its sister broadcast program, UCentral, with a $56,000 budget — enough to maintain the paper’s biweekly print schedule through the end of the year. Despite the vote, administrators overruled the board and announced that historic paper would cease to print and would go digital-only in fall 2025.
On July 21, faculty adviser Erika Williams emailed Dean Elizabeth Maier regarding the push to end print. Later that day, Maier replied that going digital “was a statement, not a request,” adding, “That decision is final and not up for debate or negotiation.”
Andrew Frazier remembers that summer as a blur of forwarded messages and quiet anger. He had just started reporting for The Vista. “I came in around July or August,” he says. “I was pretty vocal about how frustrated I was — not even about it going digital, but about the lack of transparency. They were lying to us, pretending not to know things, and gaslighting us.”
Frazier grew up in Oklahoma City, watching his father read the newspaper over breakfast every morning. He remembers well the ritual of the paper being folded and refolded, the sound of the pages, his father’s occasional comments, the smell of coffee. “I’d see him sitting out there every morning,” Frazier says, “and when he finished, I’d pick it up and read the comics — Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes.”
That’s part of why the summer’s news stung. The Vista is older than the state of Oklahoma. Yet its steward had decided the printed page was no longer worth keeping. “It was everything I hate,” Frazier says. “Spin, control, top-down messaging — happening right here, in my own community.”
The university didn’t budge. Their plea for a free press had fallen on deaf ears.
UCO administrators said print was too expensive and outdated. But their actions belied their true motives. After the advisory board’s unanimous vote to keep printing, Dean Maier floated a “Vista Going Digital Launch Party” and even offered to pay for refreshments. Board chair Joe Hight objected that the administration’s decision ignored both data and process. When Hight shared a letter from Vista donors Jim Epperson and Bob Ray, in which they warned that ending print would betray The Vista’s tradition as “a watchdog . . . protected by the First Amendment” — the university didn’t budge. Their plea for a free press had fallen on deaf ears.
Not only that, but the university kept pushing to ensure their voice wouldn’t find a print audience. Students asked if they could print using money from the Dennie Hall Endowment, an alumni fund for The Vista. Administrators said no. At a budget meeting before the semester, students say they were warned that if they printed with donor funds, the university would cut funding for the entire student-media program. “They read our emails out loud,” Spurlock remembers, referring to messages students had written to professors, asking for help. “And then they said they’d cut everything if we printed. That’s when I cried.”
A week later, at administrators’ direction, facilities workers removed The Vista’s newspaper racks from campus.
By fall, Frazier and several other students decided that if The Vista couldn’t publish freely, they’d build something that could. They called it The Independent View. It was scrappy, student-run, and fueled by small donations and borrowed space. “It feels like a startup with your friends,” Frazier says. “We’re all in it together, building something honest.”
Their first major story, published in their inaugural edition on Oct. 28, showed exactly why that sense of independence mattered.
The play they tried to cancel
In late September, two UCO juniors, Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch, were preparing to direct the play Boy My Greatness, about the boys who played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s England. “It’s so heartbreaking but also so heartwarming,” Welch told The Independent View. “You see these people who are exactly like you, but it’s 1606.”
The students had spent months rehearsing. Their actors were cast, their set built, and the script licensed from the playwright. Then, hours before their first rehearsal on Sept. 3, the play lost university support. The reason? Senate Bill 796, Oklahoma’s new law restricting DEI programming at public colleges.
At first, no one could say who made the call. The Independent View’s coverage detailed what the university had tried to obscure: that the decision had come not from the theater department, but from upper administration, which cited legal concerns over the play’s “contract requirements.”
Lawson and Welch were offered a choice: pick a different play under university oversight, or continue without university support. They chose independence.
That night, they posted a TikTok explaining what had happened and launched a GoFundMe, hoping for a few hundred dollars. Instead, they raised nearly $10,000 overnight, and their story spread across campus and into national outlets like Playbill.
“We thought we’d get a couple hundred bucks and a pat on the back,” Welch said. “We were shocked when it blew up.”
To the students behind The Independent View, the story wasn’t just about a canceled show. It was about how easily art and journalism could be choked by the same bureaucratic caution. “If they can pull a play hours before rehearsal,” Frazier said, “what can’t they pull?”
The story they erased
For Spurlock, the stakes were clear long before that first edition of The Independent View. Her breaking point had come months earlier at The Vista, when she covered the University of Central Oklahoma Student Association and its student activity fee allocations. The fee is approximately $5 per student. Spurlock found that the UCOSA president controlled roughly 84% of the funds — but couldn’t fully account for them.
When Spurlock pressed him, UCOSA President Cooper Autry stalled and evaded. “He did not want to talk to me,” she recalls. “I had to follow up three times.” She spoke to an anonymous source within UCOSA who confirmed the numbers. Spurlock filed her report and saw it pass through every level of review. With no red flags raised in the editorial process, The Vista took the article to press. Then, UCOSA leadership and university staff demanded a meeting. “They printed out my story and highlighted everything they didn’t like,” she says. “They called it defamation.”
She remembers the meeting feeling like a trial. Around the table sat UCOSA’s president, vice president, two advisors, and a university budget administrator. On her side were a fellow student, Jake Ramsey, and her faculty adviser, Erika Williams. “It felt like divorce court,” she says. “They tore it apart, line by line.”
‘Once you’ve had your story deleted, you know how easily the truth can just… vanish.’
When the meeting ended, administrators told Spurlock not to worry, that it was “not a big deal.” But she left shaken. “I didn’t know if I’d done something wrong,” she says. “I just knew I was supposed to be learning to be a watchdog, and instead I was being told to sit down.”
Williams, who had told Spurlock beforehand that the piece was solid, took the story down from The Vista’s website soon after. “They didn’t fix an error,” Spurlock says. “They erased a story.”
The numbers she’d reported never changed. The university never issued a correction. That experience shaped how Spurlock saw everything that came next: the summer votes, the override, the disappearance of the newspaper racks. “Once you’ve had your story deleted,” she says, “you know how easily the truth can just… vanish.”
That disappearing act gets even easier when the story is never printed on paper in the first place. So when the print ban came, she recognized the pattern. “I’m not here to cover up the ugly,” she says. “I’m here to make it known.”
Broken eggs
In late October, FIRE sent a letter to UCO President Todd Lamb, accusing the school of violating the Constitution by meddling in The Vista’s operations. The letter cited every detail the students had described — the print ban, the confiscated racks, the threats to defund the program, and the retaliation against those who resisted. It even noted an earlier remark Lamb made to a former editor suggesting the paper stop focusing on “broken eggs” and focus instead on “perfectly good omelette” stories.
FIRE called the university’s actions a “prior restraint on expression” and a form of viewpoint discrimination, urging UCO to lift the print ban and reaffirm its student journalists’ right to publish freely. So far, the university has stayed silent.
‘It was never about printing a paper. It was about how they took away our voice.’
Meanwhile, The Independent View grows. Its newsroom is a patchwork of laptops, coffee shops, and Zoom calls. Reporters write between classes and part-time jobs. Their funding comes not from the university but from alumni and locals — many of them graduates who remember reading The Vista in its heyday.
“We’re not funded by the university,” Frazier says. “Our funders just want good, honest news.”
Spurlock’s old copy of her first article sits in a drawer in her dorm room. The paper has yellowed a bit. Before the first edition of The Independent View went to press, she recalled missing the smell of ink, the weight of the page. “At the end of the day,” she says, “it was never about printing a paper. It was about how they took away our voice.”
She thinks back to the crooked staples of her childhood booklets, where she got her first taste of the power of storytelling — the pride of putting ink to an idea, shaping something lasting from scattered scraps. She knows now that making something real means breaking a few eggs.
And at The Independent View, they’ve only just started to cook.
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"