What Zohran Mamdani Learned as an Africana Studies Major at Bowdoin

It wasn’t so much what Zohran Mamdani said. It was how he said it.

“We’re going to stand up for Haiti, because you taught the world about freedom!” the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York exclaimed to an elated crowd at a Haitian music festival in June, fresh off his upset victory in the primary.

Mr. Mamdani pronounced the island nation’s name “AH-ee-tee” — near-perfect Creole elocution.

“When I heard him say that, I smiled,” recalled Brian Purnell, one of Mr. Mamdani’s former professors at Bowdoin College. He also noted that Mr. Mamdani’s reference to freedom was a nod to Haiti’s status as the first republic founded by former slaves.

“That’s straight out of the lessons from the Haitian Revolution that we teach in Africana studies,” said Dr. Purnell, who is now the chair of the Africana studies department at Mr. Mamdani’s alma mater. “I will claim that,” he added with a laugh.

If Mr. Mamdani becomes the next mayor of New York, as polls suggest, he will be mold-breaking in striking ways. He would be the first Muslim, the first democratic socialist and, at 34, among the youngest to hold the office.

He would also become one of the most visible representations of a new generation of progressives — whose formative years as young adults were shaped by elite colleges where, over the last decade, theories of social and racial justice became even more deeply ingrained in liberal arts education.

Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there — readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus — is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.

Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy.

Indeed, for many on the political right, Mr. Mamdani’s college years are a case study in the ever-leftward march of the academy.

But what did the mayoral candidate actually learn at Bowdoin?

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about his college years. But his professors there challenged the idea that his education was politically circumscribed, and described a serious student who was interested in history and sociology, and whose assignments covered the ideas of conservatives and leading American thinkers.

At the same time, Mr. Mamdani also came to campus with a sense of what he wanted to study, his professors said, and a well-established politics, imparted from his parents and their rarefied social circles.

His studies complemented his commitment to political activism. At Bowdoin, he formed a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, before the group became a polarizing national force, and unsuccessfully tried to persuade Bowdoin to join an academic boycott of Israel.

If anything, his college years seemed to deepen his commitment to his already defined worldview.

The Bowdoin Years

In the fall of 2010, Barry Mills, the college’s president at the time, welcomed the class of 2014 with a convocation speech that addressed a simmering controversy over the direction of liberal arts education at an exclusive school like Bowdoin, with enviable U.S. News rankings and where tuition then ran about $56,000.

Mr. Mills recounted what he had been hearing in conversations with donors and alumni and repeated what a grandfather had told him. None of his neighbors, this man said, “would ever think of sending their kids to Bowdoin, given the lack of diversity of views here. We are, they believe, simply a liberal hotbed disconnected from reality.”

In his speech, Mr. Mills defended the college but made his own plea to “guard against political correctness.” Mr. Mills, who has since retired, declined to comment.

Mr. Mamdani came to Bowdoin that fall already well versed in the liberal curriculum that Mr. Mills had heard an earful about. He came from a family of Indian intellectuals who had lived in Uganda and South Africa, so the colonial experience was familiar to him from an early age.

And his father, Mahmood Mamdani, an anthropology professor at Columbia University, belonged to a group of historians and theorists whose work on race, colonialism and state violence challenged traditional Western interpretations of history.

Africana studies, also called Black studies or African American studies, was an early part of that movement. Its birth as an academic discipline, during the social and political upheaval of the late 1960s, came only after Black activists demanded that the study of their heritage, as well as the history of other marginalized groups, be taken more seriously in the academy.

That success helped pave the way for what is now a sprawling and highly influential domain of American higher education: the “studies programs,” which focus on the experiences of select identities. These include women’s studies, queer studies, Asian studies and Latino or Chicano studies.

Mr. Mamdani has recalled his Africana studies education fondly. Bowdoin, he said, is where he first read Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial militant and psychiatrist who wrote about the psychic injuries that racism causes.

But his professors said that their curriculum also included more traditional American thinkers and writers.

“A deep commitment to social justice can just as easily emerge from figures steeped deeply in American intellectual traditions,” said Patrick Rael, a history professor who taught Mr. Mamdani in a seminar on Reconstruction.

Citing Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Rael said, “I hear in Zohran’s words nothing that would surprise any of these figures, all of whom form part of Bowdoin’s curriculum.”

Mr. Mamdani stood out to his professors, too.

“No. 1, it’s very rare for someone to come to college and say, ‘I want to major in Africana studies,’” Dr. Purnell, his professor who taught the Haitian Revolution, said.

As one of only 10 students in his class who graduated with his major, his interests tended toward classes that dealt with history and sociology, his professors recalled. And he expressed particular interest in slavery in the United States and Reconstruction.

But Dr. Purnell, who taught Mr. Mamdani in several classes, recalled that his pupil also “had a way of understanding the world, and it was one that made him very intellectually curious about questions regarding justice.”

His activism for the Palestinian cause made him, at times, an adversary of college leaders. When Mr. Mamdani and other students organized a campaign in 2013 to make Bowdoin part of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, Mr. Mills rebuffed them.

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.” And he name-checked well-known scholars, such as Peggy McIntosh, whose writings on power dynamics introduced the concept of “white privilege.”

He also shared his personal experience with race, one likely to resonate with many nonwhite students at elite schools.

“I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone’s mispronunciation of an Indian woman’s name,” he wrote in a column. “I usually do, but today I’m tired. I’m tired of being one of a few nonwhite students in a classroom, if not the only one.”

The Right Pushes Back

Around this time, Bowdoin came under withering attack from conservatives, who had become increasingly vocal about the rise of identity politics on college campuses.

In 2013, with President Barack Obama in the White House and racial tensions simmering, the conservative-leaning National Association of Scholars published a 376-page report on Bowdoin that was unsparing in its criticism, accusing the college of promoting “closed-minded orthodoxies” — including Africana studies — in the name of diversity and inclusivity. The report estimated that there were only four or five conservatives out of approximately 182 full-time faculty members.

The findings became irresistible fodder for conservative news media. They seized on offerings in Bowdoin’s course book, including a seminar called “Queer Gardens,” which was described as an examination of “how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces.” (The course was canceled for lack of student interest, the report noted.)

Peter Wood, who wrote the report for the National Association of Scholars and is the organization’s president, said Bowdoin was hardly an isolated example of the academic culture the report described.

“We found ourselves in a college and university system in which voices of dissent from the prevailing views were becoming weaker and weaker,” Mr. Wood said.

Professors and students said the report did not describe the Bowdoin that they knew. Mr. Mills, then the college president, said the authors exaggerated and misrepresented student life and culture, calling it “meanspirited and personal.”

The core of that criticism, however, is now at the center of the festering debate over higher education and politics — and one that has become an undercurrent of the New York City mayoral campaign.

In his speech criticizing “elites,” Vice President Vance objected to Mr. Mamdani’s Fourth of July social media post declaring his pride in a country that is “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.”

“I wonder, has he ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?” Mr. Vance asked during a speech at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. “Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Mr. Mamdani, it turns out, did read Civil War letters. “I can assure Mr. Vance that Zohran read exactly such letters in my course,” Dr. Rael, his history professor, said.

Dr. Rael and Dr. Purnell said that conservatives have misunderstood what they and many other Africana studies scholars actually believe, and how much they value exposing students to a wide spectrum of ideas.

That approach at Bowdoin, Dr. Rael said, is “one dedicated to confronting the American past fully and truthfully before deciding what to do with that history.”

Dr. Purnell taught Mr. Mamdani in a course on the urban crisis, which examined the changing political and economic conditions in American cities after World War II.

His class, Dr. Purnell noted, included a reading assignment on the “broken windows theory,” which suggests that petty crimes like vandalism and panhandling — if left unchecked — can lead to an increase in violent crime by creating a perception of lawlessness.

The theory, embraced by Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City, is unpopular among progressives, many of whom argue that targeting low-level crimes puts too many people of color behind bars.

But having that discussion was important, Dr. Purnell said, “even if — and I don’t doubt this — most of higher education leans to the left.”

For his part, Mr. Mamdani told the Bowdoin Orient in a 2019 interview that his studies were “very formative” and informed his thinking about urban problems. “Why they exist — and who made them exist,” he said.

He also threw in some advice for student organizers, urging them to follow their passions and “not to feel like any position is too radical.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.