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It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a student there, who maybe resided only on the far periphery of your professional orbit, will become one or another kind of famous. At that point, out of the vast and silent ether, messages will come glowing into your inbox one after another. Do you remember this person? they will say. Was he your student? Did you work with him? We’re hoping for some insight—would it be possible for us to talk for a bit?
I taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you’ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani. And so, shortly after his startling, spirit-lifting victory in the primary last spring, the gentle flood of inquiries commenced. Word had gotten out not only that he went to Bowdoin—again, a very pricey, very wealthy, quite comprehensively the-thing-that-it-is small liberal arts college on the East Coast—but that, while there, he had majored in something called “Africana Studies.” You can probably see where this is going.
The first few messages wondered if I knew him (I don’t think I did, though I certainly had students who did, and do), if I taught him (possibly? but in truth not that I remembered), but mostly if I could say something about what he might have been reading and doing and studying, there in his time at this little college on the coast of Maine. More than once, the name “Frantz Fanon” was broached—which had the virtue of certain hand-showing clarity.
It gives me no joy to admit that there are certain kinds of professors who love little more than seeing their names in the paper. It’s not great, but there it is. (These are often the same sorts of people who will drop into an otherwise ordinaryish conversation phrases like, “No sure it’s like when I was teaching that big lecture class, to my students at Yale University…”) But I like to think even they would’ve been able to spot the coiled wires and rusty springs of this particular trap.
Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.
The storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism.
But then something strange happened. Some time after the initial rush died down, I got a message that seemed at least marginally less disreputable. A writer at the Times contacted me to talk. He said he was less interested in Mamdani himself than he was in the Africana Studies part—a department of which, for a handful of years back at Bowdoin, I was indeed chair. This was a kind of dilemma.
On the one hand, like a lot of my friends and peers I think it’s wise to decline speaking to the Times on principle. The reasons aren’t especially obscure: Palestine superabundantly, but also decades of hyper-sensationalizing crime reporting, the neverending centrist stooge’ing, all the unparody-able rest of it. On the other, though, this was not a request to write but to contribute something in the way of context, knowledge even, and I did in fact have some legit expertise on the question of Africana Studies, a discipline about which I have a lot of detailed, informed, enthusiastically ratifying things to say.
Then too there was a whole other set of incentives. It’s fair to say that, former student of mine or not, 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.
For some time I’ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms—one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while—and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn’t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, both are barbarisms. Mamdani seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all that. A part of me wanted to do him a solid.
And so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn’t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I’d have outgrown by now, I’m a fucking idiot.
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As it happened, the reporter and I never spoke. We made an appointment that he missed, and because my current job is something of a bureaucratic black hole, I wasn’t able to clear another time to talk. I did write him a longish message about Africana Studies, and he did speak with at least two of my former colleagues (who, bless them, acquitted themselves more than admirably). And he managed to write that story, which appeared in the Times less than a week before the mayoral election, under the anodyne title “How a Small Elite College Influenced Mamdani’s World View.” It’s a wreck, but of a form so pure, so purely Timesian, you almost have to admire it. It certainly is instructive.
Here’s the pitch:
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.
“Critics say” is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. First, note that this criticism (“Majors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women’s studies, these critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history. Some disparagingly call the entire field ‘grievance studies’”) gives to the article the whole of its contrapuntal structure of argument: these scholars and teachers say Mr. Mamdani’s education is substantial, yet critics say something else. But then note as well that this counter-position is substantiated, in its length and breadth, by: J. D. Vance and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the former a man whose fervid anti-intellectualism needs no introduction, the latter a conservative 501(c)3 flush with money from the Olin, Bradly, and Castle Rock Foundations, and more lately affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and its delirious “Project 2025” document. The author refers to the group as “conservative-leaning,” which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war.
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.
It was this very NAS who, back in 2013, issued a white paper about the decadence and depravity of Bowdoin College particularly, clutching at pearls by the ropefull in objection to the college’s justice-forward curricula, its alleged diminishment of the classical virtues, the bare existence of something called “queer studies.” (Full disclosure: I was, in my full-throttle commitment to destroying those heralded civilizational virtues, also chair of the Program in Gay and Lesbian Studies for a while there.) It for sure made a sort of splash when it appeared, although the Times author does not note it did so chiefly by gathering around itself pleasing and extensive ridicule, most all of it on the grounds of being a bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff. The great Gawker headline summed it all up best: “Conservative Scholar’s Investigation Says Bowdoin College is Awesome,” it read, which I can say was much appreciated in the hallways of the college back then.
For all that, I read last week’s Times piece with a genuine sinking of heart, though not because it was especially unforeseen or even because it will have any serious effect, either on Bowdoin or on Mamdani himself, whose path to decisive victory went on quite undiverted. The gall, you could say, had a different savor.
When writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it’s a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, 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.
One can take some comfort, I suppose, from the sense that, in this instance at least, the stakes were pretty low. Unlike the austerity-battered and enormous urban working-class university where I now teach, Bowdoin is a preposterously rich school, beloved by and to the planetary ruling classes, and they’ll be fine. Shed no tears for the place, or for what is functionally a bit of prestige-media advertising, unlikely even in its most churlish moments to discourage any of its chosen demographic from applying. As for Mamdani, he cruised to a victory that was no less resounding, and no less heartlifting, for being achieved in the teeth of so much unhinged hatefulness.
But that comfort wears thin pretty quickly, and I imagine you can see why. In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It’s not hard to call them all to mind: “Climate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Trans people claim to be real, though critics say…”
Every bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it’s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you’ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf—“Can Woman Think?: We Investigate,” “Is the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration”—that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran this actual story, which is not parody.)
It’s all a bit humiliating—or it is for me. Because I did take time for this reporter, despite my misgivings. I even went so far as to write my thoughts out for him, on the chance they might be clarifying or useful. “The first thing to say,” I told him, “is that Africana Studies at Bowdoin is less a singular pursuit than a suite of scholarly disciplines, condensed around a set of objects and questions.” And then, warming to the pedagogical project, I talked about anthropology, art and architecture, music, religion, the history of science, whole grand traditions of invention and resolve. I talk about James Weldon Johnson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen, and Hortense Spillers, and a good deal else and I mean… would you listen to how pathetic that all sounds?
I read it over now with this kind of full-spectrum cringe of the spirit. It’s the rattle of a person going on and professorially on, quite as if the substance of a discipline, or its intellectual trajectory, or even just the nourishing joy of sustained and serious study, mattered at all to the person he was talking to, or to the majestic institution he represents. And honestly, what could be more feeble?
It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn’t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you.
