The Bowdoin Socialists are promoting a noted guest lecturer later this fall amid administration orders to tone down their allegedly controversial politics.
The group is closely aligned with 2014 alum socialist organizer Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of America’s largest city.
The campus socialists, who organized their chapter after Mamdani’s recent New York City election, say they’ve invited Mamdani’s father to give a “virtual” campus lecture later this year.
The plans to bring Mahmood Mamdani to the school come in the wake of a dust-up between the campus socialists and the administration.
The school’s socialists received a recent email from administrators claiming their group was illegitimate.
“The college asserted that any student group must register before communicating on social media,” according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The foundation says it told school officials they “may not regulate student groups.”
The restriction on socialist speech “constitutes an unconstitutional prior restraint,” the foundation claims.
“While Bowdoin is a private college not bound to grant students freedom of expression by the First Amendment, it makes independent promises to the same effect, enshrining ‘free expression of widely varying views’ as an integral part of the college community,” Dominic Coletti, the foundation’s Student Press Freedom Initiative director, recently wrote the administration.
“Based on this strong promise, students have every reason to believe their rights would be substantially the same as the rights they enjoy off campus under the First Amendment, which protects merely offensive expression,” Coletti said.
After Coletti pushed back in behalf of the socialists, the school reportedly backed down from its demands they cease political activity.
The Bowdoin Socialists, who draw their inspiration from their now-famous alum, is an independent “anti-capitalist and anti-fascist coalition” advocating for socialism on campus.
Zohran Mamdani cut his eye teeth on socialism when he was a student at the elite college from 2010 to 2014.
The Bowdoin Socialists apparently can’t get enough of the prominent, politically divisive Mamdani family.
They are organizing a lecture later this year by Mahmood Mamdani, the mayor’s father who teaches anthropology at Columbia University.
“The lecture date is to be announced but it is in the fall semester,” student spokesman Finley Rhys said.
(Columbia is the same school that rejected Zohran Mamdani’s application in 2009 after he was reported to have falsely claimed minority status – checking a box claiming he was black, which he isn’t.)
So he ended up in Maine where, during his years at Bowdoin, he editorialized in the student paper about his having to face continual “white supremacy” while on campus.
Mamdani’s college followers, meanwhile, have taken their lessons well, not afraid of stirring up political fever, whether they’re registered on campus or not.
They are now “currently talking to Hasan Piker about his coming to campus,” according Rhys.
Piker, an avowed Marxist, is a widely-followed, controversial leftist commentator on the Twitch platform.
“Hasan has promoted Bowdoin Socialists often, and I’m working with his management to organize a visit for him to speak on campus, which he’s expressed interest in,” Rhys told The Maine Wire.
“Hasan is definitely the biggest inspiration for me and the group,” Rhys said. “I would love to help organize a talk, lecture, or debate through the organization with him, and he has recently said he’d like to participate.”
Rhys underscored that the Bowdoin Socialists group “fully endorses all of his statements,” no matter how controversial they may be – and they are.
Piker is “among the loudest voices on the American left,” leftist news journal Mother Jones said over the weekend on X. “Depending on who you ask, he’s either one of the most dangerous voices in American politics or one of the most honest.”
Time named him on its Top 100 Creators list.
“Certain factions of the Democratic Party have spent the last several weeks trying to make him a liability for the candidates he supports, pointing to off-color, if not offensive, comments he’s made over the years as evidence that he’s too toxic to touch,” Garrison Hayes of Mother Jones said.
Bowdoin administrators dealing with the likes of Piker and Fr. Mamdani will be ruing the day they gave campus socialists any attention, let alone trying to shut them down.
