Bowdoin College: Finishing School for a Socialist | The American Spectator

While New York City’s new Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political worldview was formed by his radical parents long before he arrived at Bowdoin College, his evolution underscores how college curricula shape more than minds. Colleges like Bowdoin mold convictions, identities, and life trajectories — and help to create the radical left-wing change agent New York City has elected to lead its City.

Long before college, Zohran Mamdani was steeped in socialism by his father, Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, a renowned scholar of postcolonial politics, who exposed his young son to Marxist theory and postcolonial resistance. Grounding his convictions in a transnational rejection of neoliberalism and American exceptionalism, the elder Mamdani has devoted his life to criticizing colonialism, state violence, and Western interventionism. A recent article in the Times of India suggested that Zohran Mamdani’s father “provided him with the intellectual tools to interrogate power.” (RELATED: The Faulty Idealism of the Anti-Wealth Brigade)

Given this ideological foundation of anti-Americanism, it’s likely that the family viewed Bowdoin as a kind of “finishing school” for their son’s socialism. The family had to know that Bowdoin was a place where academic rigor and leftist thought could refine a burgeoning radical sensibility — a place where he would be given the tools he would need to destroy capitalism and American exceptionalism once and for all. (RELATED: Mayor Mamdani: A Victory for Champagne Socialism)

The family was correct. In a revelatory essay published last week in Literary Hub, former Bowdoin Professor Peter Coviello, who chaired the university’s Gay and Lesbian Studies Program, as well as its’ Africana Studies Program during the years Mamdani attended, appeared to affirm that Mamdani’s intellectual formation at Bowdoin exemplifies how a curriculum can catalyze a radical reimagining of the world.

In a broadside attack on capitalism and the American founding, Coviello wrote:

For some time I’ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms — one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while — and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn’t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, both are barbarians.

While at Bowdoin, Zohran Mamdani founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and led a campaign to persuade Bowdoin to join an academic boycott of “Israel’s oppressive occupation and racist policies.” With obvious support for his pro-Palestinian activism on campus from like-minded faculty members, Mamdani’s anti-Israel stance appears to have been forged during his years there. (RELATED: Radical Academics Seed the Ground for Violence)

In a New York Times article about Bowdoin’s influence on Mamdani’s politics, entitled “How a Small Elite College in Maine Influenced Zohran Mamdani’s Worldview,” Times reporter Jeremy Peters wrote that

Mr. Mamdani also contributed articles to the student newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, and a few reflect the confluence between his studies and his politics. He discussed theoretical concepts he would have picked up in an Africana studies class. In one column, for instance, he implored the Bowdoin community to “break the stranglehold of whiteness, wherever it may be.” Drawing upon the anti-whiteness theories of scholar, Peggy McIntosh, whose work is widely read as part of DEI programs on elite campuses like Bowdoin, Mamdani introduced his readers to the need to check the power dynamics of “white privilege.”

Mamdani’s rhetoric on whiteness was less about race than about dismantling the idea of American exceptionalism. His critique of whiteness at Bowdoin served as a proxy for a deeper rejection of American exceptionalism and its global legacy. This rejection naturally extended to his view of Israel — not as an ally upholding democratic ideals — but rather as a colonial outpost that is complicit with the United States in its system of oppression. (RELATED: Oberlin Students Revive Criminal Anti-Israel Protests, Police Respond)

This hatred for Israel appears to have become even stronger in recent years at Bowdoin. Less than a decade after Mamdani graduated in 2014, Bowdoin hired Professor Nasser Abourahme in 2022 — a professor in the Middle Eastern and North African Studies Program who actually praised the Hamas terrorists who perpetrated the deadly violence in Israel during the October 7 attack. The rampage resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis, including civilians and military personnel, along with at least 46 Americans. An additional 251 individuals were taken hostage in the dark tunnels of Gaza, many of whom endured brutal treatment and starvation in the months that followed. Yet, Professor Abourahme told a commentator for Radio Zamaneh in a Nov. 11, 2023 2023 interview  that he was “not shy about the fact that people engaged in armed struggle against this invasion are heroic.” According to a transcript of the interview, Abourahme elaborated proudly on his moral and intellectual support for the terrorists who raped, murdered, and kidnapped civilians living in Israel.

Mamdani’s intellectual trajectory is a reminder that college is not merely a place of academic instruction.  It is a powerful site of moral and philosophical formation, a catalyst for reshaping values and convictions. Conservative parents understand this intuitively, which is why they choose institutions that align with their deepest convictions. They know that curriculum is never neutral: it shapes how students see the dignity of the human person, respect for life, justice, and a genuine commitment to uplift the poor and vulnerable by helping them help themselves.

In an age when elite colleges often promote ideological frameworks hostile to faith, family, and tradition, vigilance in college selection is not just prudent — it’s essential. That’s why many conservative families turn to institutions like Hillsdale or Grove City College, neither of which accept federal funds and are under no obligation to provide transgender bathrooms or DEI classes.

Many of these families turn to faithful religious universities like my own academic home, Franciscan University of Steubenville, or Ave Maria University, because they know that these are schools that integrate rigorous academics with conservative principles. These colleges don’t just educate; they form students to think clearly, live virtuously, and lead courageously in a culture that often rejects those very ideals.

READ MORE from Anne Hendershott:

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Electing the Image: Mamdani and the Mimetic Turn in Democracy

From the Top Down: The Erosion of Faith at Georgetown University