Special election profile: Yvonne Dean-Bailey, ‘the Michele Bachmann of Mount Holyoke’
Yvonne Dean-Bailey, the 19-year-old Massachusetts college student vying to become one of the youngest female lawmakers in New Hampshire history, has been dubbed the “Michele Bachmann of Mount Holyoke“ by her classmates for her outspoken conservative views.
On May 19, the Phillips Exeter Academy graduate from Northwood will face off against Democrat Maureen Mann, a former three-term state representative, in a special election to fill the House seat vacated by Republican Brian Dobson, who resigned to work for Congressman Frank Guinta.
As a freshman at Mount Holyoke College, Dean-Bailey writes for Campus Reform, where she works "to expose liberal bias and abuse at colleges and universities in Massachusetts.” The news site for young conservative students is sponsored by Leadership Institute, which reportedly receives much of its funding from large, conservative foundations including the F.M. Kirby Foundation and the DeVos Foundation.
A sampling of Dean-Bailey’s work for Campus Reform includes articles titled, “Vassar sex magazine hosts silent sex toy auction,” “Students raise money for illegal immigrant scholarship,” “Students create BDSM club at all-women’s school” and “Mount Holyoke students say ‘black on black’ crime doesn’t exist.”
Dean-Bailey has been particularly critical of the decision by Mount Holyoke, an all-women’s college, to accept applications from transgendered students.
"I believe this is nothing but a political stunt by the administration to increase enrollment and to create a monopoly against other women’s colleges who have rejected this policy in the past,” she told Campus Reform.
“As a student at Mount Holyoke I applied for an all-women’s college, I paid for an all-women’s college, and I expect to attend an all-women’s college. Mount Holyoke is no longer fulfilling their end of the bargain,” she complained.
“Mount Holyoke went from being a women’s college to being a women’s college with an asterisk,” she said in a separate interview with the student newspaper. “For people like me, who made the decision to attend a single-sex college, that asterisk is pretty important.”