Photo by Carmen Mickelson '24. According to Pradeep, conservative media platforms' interviews with Annabella Rockwell '15 sensationalize Mount Holyoke College campus culture.
By Jahnavi Pradeep ’23
Opinion Editor
Content Warning: This article mentions white supremacy.
Mount Holyoke College has recently been abuzz with conversations regarding the College’s recent popularity in conservative media. Sprawling across social media meme pages to classroom discussions and casual conversations exchanged between peers, the name Annabella Rockwell has become a constant in many of our vocabularies over the past two weeks and since we returned from November break.
The root of this new conversation is a Nov. 26, 2022, feature published by the New York Post titled, “Mount Holyoke grad deprogrammed from women-only woke culture.” The article centers on a profile of Annabella Rockwell ’15, an alumna who used the platform to speak on the dangerous and cult-like culture she felt during her time as an undergraduate student at Mount Holyoke College. The article was quickly picked up by other tabloids and media companies, including Daily Mail and multiple Fox News outlets. For example, on Nov. 30, 2022, Rockwell appeared for a segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
The multiple coverages on Rockwell’s experiences at the College and what Tucker Carlson, for example, describes as a cult whose students “won’t love their parents anymore” reflects conservative media’s obsession with slander. Their focus, markedly inaccurate, on Rockwell’s discussion of the Mount Holyoke College campus culture is insensitive to the students who are still on campus, invading their privacy while simultaneously caricaturing the intent and space of a gender-diverse women’s college.
In an article for The New York Times, Michael M. Grynbaum discusses the influx of fake news put out by right-wing media. While focusing on lawsuits faced by media houses such as Fox News and Newsmax, Grynbaum discusses how right-wing media often gets away with spreading disinformation and “delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content.” In an opinion article for National Broadcasting Company, Dan Froomklin discusses Fox News in particular for being guilty of reporting such disinformation. Froomklin stated, “The biggest takeaway for me is the realization that Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of ‘news-like’ things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening.”
“Watching Fox, they hear a lot of ‘news-like’ things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening.”
Rockwell becomes one such entry point for right-wing media to manipulate information regarding liberal arts and gender-diverse women’s college campuses. In the original New York Post article, Rockwell discussed her perceived indoctrination at the College with writer Dana Kennedy. Rockwell, a pharmaceutical heiress and hired this year as a fundraiser at conservative advocacy group PragerU, studied at what Kennedy terms “posh Mount Holyoke,” from 2011-2015. While she entered the College open-minded, “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” she said to Kennedy that “she wound up ‘totally indoctrinated’ into viewing the world as a toxic patriarchy and herself as an oppressed victim — and eventually had to be deprogrammed.” In summary, her mother felt the need to intervene and hire a $300-a-day expert to work closely with Rockwell and help her undo her Mount Holyoke education.
In discussing her need for deprogramming, Rockwell focused particularly on how the College forced her to acknowledge the existence of a patriarchal structure and to stand by and fight for other victims, namely, as quoted in the New York Post, “women, people of color and LBGTQ[+] folks.” This then made her anxious, nervous and depressed. The danger starts herein, where Rockwell and the media platforms that amplify her voice ignore the gravity of the issues of marginalization and oppression that they callously discuss. Rockwell comes from a place of class and race privilege, and as she mentioned, is someone who has not experienced sexism. Her choice to regard herself as a victim of an indoctrination camp in which she was forced to consider experiences outside of her privileged position reduces the dialogue on oppression and marginalization to a dangerous trope of how gender-diverse women’s colleges make miserable products out of students.
Furthermore, in line with what Froomklin stated about conservative media distorting content, the New York Post article and its succeeding coverages chronicle disinformation sold as reliable news through its personal account of a former student. Rockwell is guilty of manipulating readers to consume information through an inaccurate lens, and her story is reduced to clickbait tabloid. To point out one such blatant error, Rockwell discussed with Carlson on Tucker Carlson Tonight how first-year students at Mount Holyoke participate in ritualistic head shaving to assert themselves as rebels. Not only is the description of this voluntary student-loved tradition incorrect, as it also involves students merely cutting some of their hair, but it also manages to paint Mount Holyoke students to be blindly impressionable and lacking in any individual voice or autonomy.
Rockwell’s sensationalized storytelling diminishes Mount Holyoke College to an educational institution that forces students to conform to a single harmful ideology that frowns upon diversity of thought. However, the College stands on the opposite end of the spectrum in intending to provide students with an educational experience aimed at being inclusive. Mount Holyoke describes the importance of community as part of the liberal arts education on their website, which states, “most importantly, we recognize all identities as multidimensional, intersectional — and we explore that fact in class, in community, in our cultural centers and in our residence halls.” Herein, it becomes essential to consider how “women, people of color and LGBTQ[+] folks” have been and continue to be marginalized and oppressed. This is the very same reason our education considers the importance of studying subjects such as gender studies, contrary to what Rockwell would like to believe.
Rockwell is not alone. The New York Post supplements her perspective with that of Laura Loomer, a Mount Holyoke student from the same class year as Rockwell who withdrew from the College. Loomer echoed Rockwell’s sentiment on being victimized for her conservative beliefs. She spoke to Kennedy on how colleges like Mount Holyoke and the other Seven Sisters are “centers for indoctrination.” She continued, “If you send your kid there you’re signing them up to hate the patriarchy and white people and the founding stock of our country. It’s a bastardization of higher education for the sake of weaponizing naive young women for the sake of advancing a toxic agenda.” Loomer, like Rockwell, peddles incorrect and reductive insights on the College culture. For instance, she assumes the student body to be “naive young women,” reflecting her limited awareness on the debates she pretends to be well versed on. Furthermore, her interchangeable usage of toxic agenda and education on patriarchy reinforces the dangers of white supremacy in the United States. This only drives the importance of campuses like Mount Holyoke College that are intended to be gender-diverse colleges built on ideas of diversity and inclusion that seem to be the antithesis of what news networks like Fox News stand for.
Conservative media houses are making the most of Mount Holyoke’s caricature. For example, Fox News alone has had two interviews with Rockwell, with one segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight and the other on Fox and Friends. Both covered the same cut-and-pasted content. Furthermore, Daniel Wallace wrote an article for Fox News Digital on Nov. 27, 2022, titled “Mother of NYC heiress paid 'deprogrammer' big bucks after daughter 'brainwashed' by college's woke agenda.” This obsession is dangerous to the privacy of students on campus. Mount Holyoke College has currently been approached by different media houses, including the New York Post, Fox News Digital, and Daily Mail. While the College did not immediately reply, this proximity to campus intrudes on students’ safety. Mount Holyoke College has nodded toward this possible invasiveness of the media. On Nov. 30, 2022, the College sent out an advisory on dealing with unwanted press outreach as part of their weekly update email. They guided students to contact Public Safety and Service in the event of “outreach that includes either threatening or menacing language or discusses a community member’s personal information.”
Mount Holyoke is a college campus that must be safe for students. The current article coverage and accompanying obsessions threaten this space, particularly the safety of those marginalized communities identified by Rockwell. This only increases the need for educational experiences such as that provided by Mount Holyoke College. Racial and gender marginalization are still stark realities today that cannot be flippantly discarded in conservative attempts to malign liberal ideologies. Hate and bias are only reinforced through right-wing media popularizing voices like Rockwell’s. Media has to have a purpose to educate and accurately inform, not twist and manipulate stories to drive forth political agendas and dangerous ideologies that reinforce white supremacy.