America’s Colleges Helped Produce Zohran Mamdani

 By Henry Srebrnik, Moncton Times & Transcript

The biggest and most famous city in the United States has just elected a far-left 34-year-old Democratic Party mayor. 

Zohran Mamdani gained his victory Nov. 4 thanks partly to the decline and subversion of higher education in America, with the ever-growing power and influence of so-called tenured radicals who espouse various versions of Marxism.

On elite campuses, students have been trained to sort every question through identity and power. They are told that there is an unbridgeable conflict between the haves and have-nots, usually defined by ethnicity, gender, and race. Ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism now permeate courses across the board.

So much has been written about Mamdani that it’s hard to add much that is new. But he is a phenomenon and a cautionary tale, because he represents the decades of left-wing indoctrination found in elite colleges, where the privileged sons and daughters of people like his own parents, prominent academics and filmmakers, have turned against the liberal, centrist and capitalist  order that helped them attain their own status.

Mamdani’s formative years were shaped by theories of social and racial justice that have become deeply ingrained in liberal arts education. He graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there has made clear that such colleges are training institutions for leftist political orthodoxy.

Africana studies, also called Black studies or African American studies, was an early part of that movement. Its birth as an academic discipline came after Black activists demanded that the study of their heritage, as well as the history of other marginalized groups, become part of the curriculum.

Mamdani came to Bowdoin already well versed in these theories. He comes from a cosmopolitan family of South Asian intellectuals who had lived in Uganda – he was born in Kampala -- and South Africa. He was seven years old when they came to the U.S.

His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an eminent anthropology professor at Columbia University who belongs to a group of historians and theorists whose work on race, colonialism and state violence challenged traditional Western interpretations of history. Another, far more famous, academic, fellow Columbia professor of literature Edward Said, was a good friend. His mother, Mira Nair, is an equally well-regarded filmmaker.

Mamdani draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony. Bowdoin, Mamdani has explained, is where he first read Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Caribbean militant who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, about the psychic injuries caused by racism, while he was working with the Arab nationalists fighting French colonialism in Algeria. The Algerian revolutionary legitimated Third World terrorist violence.

Mamdani’s senior thesis focused on Fanon’s relationship to the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his convictions echo the Fanon’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity.

In this moral landscape, Israel holds a special place: the final embodiment of Western domination, a state seen as the successor to the colonial powers that were once resisted by the Third World. From the 1960s onward, these movements increasingly framed their politics through anti-Zionism, portraying Palestinian resistance as the moral centre of a global struggle. Opposition to Israel functions as a continuation of decolonization.

Mamdani’s studies complemented his commitment to political activism. At Bowdoin, there was no mistaking the intensity with which he took up his chosen cause: Palestinians’ struggle with Israel. He formed a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and unsuccessfully tried to persuade Bowdoin to join an academic boycott of Israel.

Elected to the New York State Assembly at age 29, he introduced legislation to bar New York charities from funding organizations involved in Israeli West Bank settlements. His opposition to Israel gained national attention in 2023, when he told a convention of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America, “The struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the core of my politics and continues to be.” He stressed that they needed to remember what brought them to the DSA to bolster them through difficult times. “For me, it was Palestine that brought me to this movement.” Not surprisingly, he supports the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

After the Gaza war started, Mamdani began a hunger strike to protest Israel’s actions. He accused Israel of committing genocide there and described its domestic policies as apartheid. He has declined to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” ignoring the fact that the word is synonymous with terror attacks and suicide bombings. In an interview on Fox News, Mamdani dodged a question about whether Hamas should be forced to disarm. Mamdani even pledged that he would order the New York City Police Department to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister visits the city.

Universities have fostered this sensibility for decades, replacing historical complexity with ideological certainty. Mamdani’s rise is the political outcome of such education. Former President Barack Obama has called Mamdani, praising his campaign and offering to be a “sounding board” into the future.

What was nurtured in a college classroom in small-town Maine has now arrived at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City. These are indeed interesting times in America.