The self-avowed Bowdoin College Palestinian-rights cheerleader grad – now the mayor-elect of America’s biggest city – is getting an attaboy from a former ranking faculty member from the storied Brunswick school.
Peter Coviello claims The New York Times already had its formula down – criticize Bowdoin and 2014 grad Zohran Mamdani at all costs – long before it published an alleged pre-election hit piece blaming Bowdoin for producing Mamdani and his socialist creed – and vice versa.
Coviello says in a LitHub.com column, just published, that, as Africana Studies chair while Mamdani was at Bowdoin majoring in that discipline, he – Coviello – did far more than just discussing “Africa” as it relates to American history good or bad.
“Africana Studies at Bowdoin is less a singular pursuit than a suite of scholarly disciplines, condensed around a set of objects and questions,” he says, adding it includes “anthropology, art and architecture, music, religion, the history of science, whole grand traditions of invention and resolve.”
Mamdani’s four years at Bowdoin included many student-newspaper columns he wrote accusing the elite liberal arts college of white supremacy – and where he founded Students for Justice in Palestine.
As the legacy media – in Coviello’s view – tried to link Mamdani’s doctrine of radical socialism to a college on the coast of Maine, the Ugandan native nonetheless became the first Muslim mayor of New York City.
Mamdani “cruised to a victory that was no less resounding, and no less heart-lifting, for being achieved in the teeth of so much unhinged hatefulness,” Coviello writes.
“I’ve loved Mamdani’s campaign, and loved in particular the glad-hearted and admirably steady way he’s brought what not that long ago would have been absolutely ordinary social-democratic priorities (in respect to affordability, housing, health, food, education) back into the realm of mainstream political discourse,” the former Bowdoin prof says.
Coviello calls Mamdani’s primary victory earlier this year over an entrenched Democrat ex-governor “startling” and “spirit-lifting.”
After trying to get The New York Times to do a balanced story on Mamdani when its reporter contacted him before the election, Coviello says he finally gave up on fantasy.
From the Times, he argues, “what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling ‘appraisal’ surgically excised.”
