Heather Mac Donald says New York City voters just put the city’s future in the hands of a “college student.”

In a column for The Spectator, Mac Donald wrote that newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani, 34, “seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled, and self-important.”

Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and state legislator from Queens, won Tuesday’s mayoral election with 50.4 percent of the vote, defeating Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa (7.1 percent), and independent candidate and disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (41.6 percent). He is set to take office January 1, 2026.

Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, described Mamdani as a product of elite academia who enjoys "a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.”

She said Mamdani’s background shaped his politics.

“He was born to a professor of postcolonial studies and a filmmaker,” she wrote. “The young Mamdani imbibed academic anti-Westernism at the family dinner table.”

The new mayor-elect graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 2014, where he founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Mac Donald wrote that Mamdani’s “governing philosophy can be encapsulated in the slogans beloved of undergraduates confronting supposed injustice for the first time in human history: ‘People before profits!’ ‘Fight corporate greed!’ ‘Housing is a human right!’ ”

Mamdani’s campaign centered on four proposals: a four-year rent freeze, free city bus service, universal childcare, and a city-run grocery store in each borough.

Mac Donald said those plans “treat urban governance primarily as a means of shrinking the role of for-profit enterprise, expanding public control, and redistributing wealth from its creators to the so-called poor.”

She warned that the rent freeze “would decimate New York’s housing stock.”

She also criticized Mamdani’s plans to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from the police budget to a new Department of Community Safety staffed by social workers.

“The biggest lacuna in Mamdani’s pitch for the mayoralty concerned the biggest problems blighting New York: public disorder and explosive random assaults,” she wrote. “He offered solutions right out of the black studies/postcolonial theory playbook.”

Mac Donald contrasted Mamdani’s vision with the city’s turnaround in the 1990s under former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who used data-driven policing and strict enforcement to restore order.

“It took an urban-governance revolution to wrench New York from decades of squalor,” she wrote. Giuliani’s administration “measured and monitored everything” and “cleaned Times Square of prostitutes and porn parlors.”

She said Mamdani’s focus on redistributing wealth ignores the realities of how the city operates.

“Running the Leviathan that is New York City government is not an ideological project, it is an enormous management challenge,” she wrote. “Putting him at the top of Gotham’s government is like parking someone who cannot read music in front of an orchestra and expecting him to conduct Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.”

Mac Donald closed by warning that Mamdani “takes for granted all the miracles of affluence and the centuries-long evolution of private institutions and public stability that undergird his privileged lifestyle."

"Mamdani may think that those are eternal and inevitable aspects of the world," she wrote. "The city will learn under his leadership that they are not."