2016 Election Draws 'Media Frenzy' to Hillary Clinton's Alma Mater

Hillary Clinton's days at Wellesley College are a formative part of her life, and a key talking point in her campaign for the White House. But her rarefied place as "first female presidential candidate from a major party" shines a bright, and sometimes unwelcome, spotlight on her alma mater.

Rising junior Emily Bader, 19, calls it a "media frenzy."

A sampling of headlines:

"Meet the Wellesley grads who don't support Hillary Clinton"

"Hillary Battle Bernie Sanders, Chick Magnet"

“Bernie Sanders is Winning Feminists, Even at Hillary Clinton’s Alma Mater”

Massachusetts, with its prestigious universities and lauded private schools, has a proud history of producing presidents, from sitting president Barack Obama to George W. Bush. Yet there's an enduring fascination with Clinton's women's-only alma mater.

Bader, an International Relations major from Los Angeles, is also a news editor at The Wellesley News student paper, which has editorialized against and written about what it labels "sensationalist journalism."

"There have been many reporters on campus since the start of the school year, asking the same questions and writing the same articles," Bader told Patch by email. "Too often I have read articles and/or opinion pieces... describing the Hillary-following at Wellesley as driven only by the fact that Hillary graduated from Wellesley. It takes away our agency as smart, thoughtful, and informed voters."

Certainly, she said, Wellesley students and alumni are proud that one of their own has achieved the status of presidential candidate, but it doesn't affect how they vote—and that should be a given. But it hasn't been the case.

"Where was the media coverage at the University of Chicago, where Bernie went? Donald Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania, but I haven't heard of any reporters camping out at their commencement, like the BBC did at ours," Bader said. "The media coverage has lacked originality and has only fed into the gender lens that has been a part of the coverage of Hillary's campaign from the start."

Reporters have also rushed to carve out a narrative of Clinton versus Sanders animosity on campus, but Bader said that's playing up something that's not really there.

Rather, she said, Wellesley is a tight-knit community that encourages respectful debate among a highly politically engaged student body. It's how Clinton herself described campus during her years there in 1969.

Then, as now, students are engaged in cultural and political issues outside Wellesley's walls, and also work to influence administrative decisions. The Ethos Political Action Committee, a campus racial justice group formed by many of Clinton's classmates in the late 1960s, this year staged events in solidarity with student protesters at the University of Missouri, Yale University, and other colleges facing racism by their administration, in the words of 19-year-old Alexandria Otero.

Otero, a rising sophomore from San Antonio, Texas, is also with the student paper, where she's had a ring-side seat to some of the most frustrating coverage from major news outlets.

"A lot of the stories focused on a rivalry between Sanders and Hillary supporters," she said. "While interviewing students who supported either candidate, I noticed that ere was no rivalry."

Otero and Bader both jump to the same description of the coverage so far: "one-dimensional."

"In regards to the media, it seems to me that reporters have been writing a one dimensional story about Wellesley students blindly supporting an alumna," Otero said. "In reality, we have put a lot of thought into who we support. Every student I have interviewed has given me an articulate reason as to why they support their candidate and gender or alma mater are never major factors."

Patch recently reported in-depth on Clinton's time at Wellesley, as well as with the Cambridge-based Children's Defense Fund. Read our full story on "The Massachusetts Effect" here.

>> At top, Clinton speaks to graduates in a 1992 Commencement address. Photo via C-Span.