Wellesley College student newspaper joins paper of Trump’s alma mater to endorse Hillary Clinton
Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, is an alumna of the Massachusetts college.
In a move that may be more symbolic than influential, the student newspapers of Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, and the University of Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Donald Trump, came together Wednesday to jointly endorse Clinton.
In piece published on both papers’ websites, the editorial boards of The Wellesley News and The Daily Pennsylvanian wrote while Clinton “embodies her alma mater’s institutional values, Mr. Trump does not.”
Students at any institution look up to prominent alumni as models for their futures. We, at The Daily Pennsylvanian, are concerned about the precedent that Donald Trump sets for our fellow peers and how he chooses to leverage his affiliation to Penn to the rest of the world.
[…]
Certainly, we cannot expect all alumni to personify the values of their undergraduate institutions. However, when politicians leverage their academic affiliations as credentials, they come to represent the students of those institutions. Each student, alumni and faculty member is then responsible to critique that representation. While the Wellesley News has endorsed its alumna, Hillary Clinton, The Daily Pennsylvanian Opinion Board cannot stand behind Donald Trump as a candidate.
It’s not the first time those from Trump’s alma mater have tried to distance themselves from the nominee, who often flaunts his degree from Penn’s Wharton business school. In July, a group of Wharton alumni wrote an open letter to Trump “[rejecting] the use of [his] education at Wharton as a platform for promoting prejudice and intolerance.”
Clinton’s relationship with her alma mater has been relatively smooth since she graduated from the all-female Massachusetts liberal arts college in 1969.
Wellesley College was one of the few colleges where Clinton supporters outnumbered Bernie Sanders supporters during the Democratic primary. During the Massachusetts primary, Clinton won the town of Wellesley, where the school is located, overwhelmingly.
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