Mamdani graduated from the elite liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, in 2014.
Students who study Africana studies at Zohran Mamdani’s alma mater, Bowdoin College, as he did, will spend this semester participating in courses like “Affirmative Action and United States History,” “Feminist Theory: Women of Color Feminisms and the Politics of Difference,” “Race, Land and (Dis)/(Re)possession: Critical Topics in Environmental (In)justice and Subaltern Geo,” and “Advanced Afro-Modern: Dancing Towards Social Change.”
In 2019, Mamdani told the student paper, the Bowdoin Orient, 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 told the paper that student organizers should not “feel like any position is too radical.”)
Mamdani graduated from the elite liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, in 2014. The socialist New York City mayoral candidate and current front-runner’s time at the college, which then had a tuition of $56,000 per year, seemed to “deepen his commitment to his already defined worldview,” reported the New York Times, which spoke with Mamdani’s old professors.
Mamdani, the son of an anthropology professor at Columbia University, formed a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine during his time at Bowdoin and also unsuccessfully tried to persuade the college to join an academic boycott of Israel.
His experience at the school included “readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus,” according to the report.
Bowdoin is also where Mamdani says he first read Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial militant and psychiatrist who wrote about the “psychic injuries” that racism causes.
During Mamdani’s time at the college, the conservative-leaning National Association of Scholars published a 376-page report on Bowdoin that accused the college of peddling “closed-minded orthodoxies” in the name of diversity and inclusivity. The report said there were only four of five conservatives out of some 182 full-time faculty members.
At the time, Bowdoin’s course offerings included a seminar called “Queer Gardens,” which was described as an examination of “how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces.” However, the course was ultimately canceled for lack of student interest.
In the more than a decade since the report was issued, it appears not much has changed.
Students at the college are currently required to take one course each in several topics, one of which is defined as “difference, power, and inequity.”
Among the college’s fall offerings was an English course on “Wild Things: Gender, Sexuality, and Wilderness” that “Examines how ideas of wildness and wilderness have been used to generate different gender and sexual identities and politics through literature and other cultural forms in the United States.”
“Considers wilderness and wildness in relation to rugged individualism; transgressive sexualities; representations of health, disease, and disability; the extension of and resistance to state control of the body; and the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class,” a course description adds.
Other classes include “The Supreme Court and Social Change,” and numerous radical gender, sexuality and women’s studies courses, including “Queering Video Games,” “Sex Workers and Sex Work: Archival Encounters,” “Gender and Social Justice: The Art of Social Change,” and “Gendering Latin American History.”
Several courses from fall and spring 2025 included the politically correct term “Latinx” in favor of “Latino.”
And last spring, Africana studies students were offered courses in “Dance & Politics of Sexiness” and “Black Sexualities,” while gender, sexuality and women’s studies courses included “Deconstructing Masculinities” and “Gender in Early Christianity.”
Meanwhile, the two professors who spoke to the Times on Mamdani’s behalf — Africana studies professor Brian Purnell and history professor Patrick Rael — both still teach at the college.
Purnell, the author of a book called Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn, is currently teaching a course on affirmative action and United States history.
Rael, meanwhile, is studying the representation of history in modern board games, according to his biography on the college’s website.
“He starts from the premise that games constitute important instances of cultural ephemera that perform work of representation in ways bounded by the medium’s form,” the site explains. “In examining the place in games occupied by histories of slavery, genocide, and exploitation, Rael seeks to understand how games shape our understanding of the past. At the same time, he has been exploring the uses of historically-themed board games in History courses. Can games make arguments? Can games teach history? Addressing these questions makes for exciting and important work in the classroom.”
In 2016, when President Trump was elected, Rael authored a column for the Bangor Daily News called “Sitting Shiva: Mourning and Anger in Trump’s America.” The column discussed how the “forces that elected Trump threaten the beacon of liberty in a dark world.”
During his own time at the college, Mamdani’s focus on Africana studies was clear in his writings for the student paper.
In one column he advocated for the school community to “break the stranglehold of whiteness, wherever it may be.” He also cited the work of Peggy McIntosh, whose writings on power dynamics introduced the concept of “white privilege.”
In his time campaigning for New York City mayor, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has admitted to not liking capitalism and suggested billionaires should not exist.
He has proposed a slate of fantastical left-wing ideas, including universal health care, rent freezes, the use of “social workers” to control urban violence, and, perhaps his most famous proposal, to eliminate city bus fares.
A RealClearPolitics polling average shows Mamdani leading former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani last summer, by an average of 15.6 points in the polls.