Mamdani’s campaign received advice from a Harvard professor

Dr. Marshall L. Ganz, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, provided campaign advice to the mayor-elect of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who secured the mayorship on Nov. 4.

Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, was the former governor of New York for ten years, from 2011 to 2021.

Ganz previously advised Obama’s 2008 campaign. According to reporting from The Harvard Crimson, Ganz believed that the ‘08 Obama Campaign made mistakes that he hoped to help Mamdani avoid, which was referred to as “the Obama trap.”

According to the reporting by The Harvard Crimson, Ganz said that the 2008 Obama campaign was guilty of “sidelining the organizing base that elected him.”

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Ganz was involved in legal proceedings that involved the “PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF

HARVARD COLLEGE,” which were filed on Jan. 10, 2024, by “ALEXANDER KESTENBAUM and STUDENTS AGAINST ANTISEMITISM, INC.”

The docket alleged that Ganz “intentionally discriminated against three Jewish Israeli students” enrolled in his MLD-377: Organizing: People, Power, Change course.”

“For their organizing campaign class project, the three students examined ways ‘to harness and unite a majority of diverse and moderate Israelis to strengthen Israel’s liberal and Jewish democracy’,” according to the docket.

The aforementioned course claims in its description that it asks students three core questions “1. Who are my people? 2. What is the change we need? 3. How can we turn our resources into the power we need to achieve that change?”

These questions are in contradiction to his alleged behavior while teaching the course. He asks students to define who their people are and how they can create change that benefits their people, yet it was alleged simultaneously in the docket that he “threatened the students with academic consequences when they defended themselves and their project.” 

Their project was arguably attempting to effect change for their people, just as the course description explained.

The project consisted of examining ways “to harness and unite a majority of diverse and moderate Israelis to strengthen Israel’s liberal and Jewish democracy.”

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Mamdani’s campaign for the mayorship of New York City chose to affiliate itself with Ganz by allowing him to advise them, despite Ganz’s controversial past, which included alleged discrimination, particularly against Jewish students.

According to the aforementioned court docket, it is alleged that, “Harvard has been aware of its antisemitism problem for years, but its response has been, to say the least, clearly unreasonable and totally unacceptable in not just tolerating, but enabling antisemitism.”

The “president and fellows of Harvard College” elected to settle rather than go to court.

Campus Reform contacted the Mamdani campaign, Dr. Marshall L. Ganz, and the Harvard Kennedy School for comment. The article will be updated accordingly.