Bowdoin College

Overview

Long before dropping test scores became fashionable in college admissions, Bowdoin College had already done it. In 2018, Inside Higher Ed noted that the following year would mark “the 50th year since Bowdoin College dropped a requirement that all applicants submit SAT or ACT scores” — placing the policy’s start in 1969, decades ahead of the movement that swept American higher education in the 2020s (Inside Higher Ed, October 1, 2018). Bowdoin, a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, has spent much of its life ahead of — or apart from — the crowd.

The college was chartered on June 24, 1794, while Maine was still a district of Massachusetts, and named for James Bowdoin, the state’s former governor. Yet it did not open until the fall of 1802, an eight-year gap between charter and classroom that still marks its identity: students arriving at orientation learn that the “1794” on the college merchandise predates any actual instruction by nearly a decade (The Bowdoin Orient, September 13, 2019).

Today Bowdoin is led by Safa Zaki, who on July 1, 2023, became its sixteenth president and the first woman to hold the office (Bowdoin College, June 2023). Its alumni include Zohran Mamdani ‘14, whose student activism at the college — including co-founding its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — became national political news during his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign (The Bowdoin Orient, October 31, 2025). And in February 2026, the college was pulled into the fallout from a new U.S. Department of Justice release of Epstein-related files, which named two of its most prominent alumni and forced one of them, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell ‘54 H’83, to resign as honorary chair of the nonprofit that bears his name (The Bowdoin Orient, February 6, 2026).

A charter eight years before its first class

When the General Court of Massachusetts granted Bowdoin’s charter in 1794, it came with five townships as the college’s foundation, and with a mission spelled out in the act of incorporation: to “promote virtue and piety, and the knowledge of the languages and of the useful and liberal arts and sciences,” according to the 1879 American Cyclopædia entry on the college (Wikisource). The charter vested governance in two boards, one of trustees and one of overseers. But paper preceded brick. The boards did not meet until 1801, when they elected Joseph McKeen, a Dartmouth graduate, as the college’s first president; McKeen was installed in 1802, when eight students were admitted, and the first degrees were conferred in 1806 on eight graduates.

The namesake was James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, born in Boston in 1726, a 1745 Harvard graduate who governed Massachusetts from 1785 to 1787. The Massachusetts Historical Society records that Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, “was named in his honor in 1794” (Massachusetts Historical Society). He died in 1790, four years before the charter was signed — the college never saw him. His son, James Bowdoin the younger, became one of its early benefactors, giving land, minerals, an extensive private library, and a costly collection of paintings that seeded what the Cyclopædia described as a gallery “of rare excellence.”

The slow start was not for lack of plans. Construction did not begin until 1798, when architect Samuel Melcher III broke ground on Massachusetts Hall. Four years later it was habitable enough for the first group of students to move in — and for the next five years it was the college, housing students, faculty, staff, and the president’s family under one roof until Maine Hall opened in 1808. The 2019 Orient retrospective dryly notes that Mass Hall “did, in fact, make up the entirety of Bowdoin’s campus for slightly over five years,” and that the current dormitory named Maine Hall is an 1837 reconstruction of the original, which burned down in March of 1822.

Test-optional since 1969

Bowdoin went test-optional at a time when the SAT reigned nearly unchallenged in selective admissions, and it stayed the course. At a 2018 National Association for College Admission Counseling session marking the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the policy, Bowdoin’s then-dean of admissions and financial aid, Whitney Soule, described a half-century of experience: since the early 1980s, applications had grown from about 2,500 to more than 9,000, while the share of students submitting scores held steady at between two-thirds and three-quarters of each class. Most pointedly, the college had repeatedly tested whether admissions decisions made without scores predicted college success as well as decisions made with them. “There has never been a difference,” Soule said (Inside Higher Ed, October 1, 2018).

Soule said the top factors in Bowdoin’s admissions decisions were the high school transcript and the high school profile — what the applicant achieved and “how the applicant took advantage of opportunities available at a given high school.” Asked by parents whether they could share scores to get guidance on whether to submit, she said she declined to answer: “committees reviewing applicants don’t stop for a second when reviewing someone without scores,” because, she said, “We don’t wonder what’s missing, because we have enough.” At the time of that session, the Inside Higher Ed piece noted, 1,022 four-year colleges had gone test-optional — Bowdoin had been doing it for half a century before most of them.

First woman president, a famous activist alumnus, and the February 2026 files

Safa Zaki’s arrival marked a first in the college’s 229-year history. She became president on July 1, 2023, having come from Williams College, where she had served as dean of the faculty and a professor of psychology since joining in 2002 (Bowdoin College, June 2023). She was formally invested in office on October 14, 2023, in a ceremony on the Bowdoin Quad attended by the governor of Maine, Janet Mills. At the inauguration, Zaki paid tribute to the women who came before her: the first women to teach at Bowdoin, eighty years earlier, and the class of 1975 — the first graduating class to be fully coeducational (Bowdoin College, October 14, 2023).

Among the college’s alumni, the one who has generated the most noise in the 2020s is Zohran Mamdani, class of 2014. In an October 2025 retrospective, the Orient traced his Bowdoin arc in detail: an Africana studies major whose capstone focused on Frantz Fanon’s theories of culture and politics; an editor and columnist for the Orient; and the co-founder of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — which, the paper noted, remains unchartered by the college more than a decade later. His time at Bowdoin included a 2013 Orient op-ed titled “White privilege is real,” written during the National Association of Scholars’ “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” report controversy. The college itself has no official statement on Mamdani’s political career, in keeping with a policy against commenting on alumni running for office (The Bowdoin Orient, October 31, 2025).

The same Orient piece reported that two Bowdoin alumni — Reed Hastings ‘83 and John Fish ‘82 — each donated $250,000 to the Fix the City super PAC backing Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani, figures sourced to Forbes reporting. Meanwhile, current students the paper interviewed expressed support for Mamdani, citing his alignment with student activism on campus issues. The article also gives a sense of the community Mamdani inhabited: his own op-ed claimed 26 percent of the student body was Muslim, while the college’s 2025 demographics, the paper reported, included 17 percent first-generation and 22 percent Pell Grant-eligible students.

Then came February 2026. When the Department of Justice released more than three million files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the Orient reported that searching George Mitchell’s full name returned nearly 300 results in the DOJ’s Epstein Library database. The documents included emails from 2010 to 2013 between assistants of Mitchell and Epstein arranging meetings, a November 6, 2013 calendar appointment, and a 2018 iMessage exchange in which Epstein called Mitchell a “very [sic] close friend” — all after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Mitchell, a Waterville native who served 15 years in the U.S. Senate and was Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995 before his work as U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, had denied in 2019 that he had any contact with Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, telling the Portland Press Herald: “I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre… We have had no further contact” with Epstein. After the February 2026 release, his spokesperson said Mitchell “profoundly regrets ever having known Jeffrey Epstein and condemns, without reservation, the horrific harm Epstein inflicted on so many women.”

The fallout reached institutions carrying Mitchell’s name. The US-Ireland Alliance removed Mitchell’s name from its scholarship program on February 1, 2026; on February 5, Mitchell resigned as honorary chair of the Mitchell Institute, the Maine nonprofit he founded that offers scholarships to Maine students entering college; and Queen’s University Belfast removed his name from its Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. Queen’s statement was explicit about the limits of what was known: “While no findings of wrongdoing by Senator Mitchell have been made,” the university concluded it was “no longer appropriate for its institutional spaces and entities to continue to bear his name.” The Orient also reported the college’s own response: Director of Communications Doug Cook wrote that the college was “aware of the recently released documents” and “actively reviewing the information that has become available.” The college had officially named the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives in his honor in 2002.

The same file release shed light on the college’s ties to Jes Staley ‘79 P’11, the former Barclays CEO who resigned from Bowdoin’s Board of Trustees in November 2021 amid a UK Financial Conduct Authority probe. The documents detailed Epstein’s role advising Staley’s daughter, Alexa Staley ‘11, on her academic career — including obtaining a physics conference invitation for her through Harvard professor Lisa Randall in December 2009, strategizing about physics graduate programs, and Epstein’s reported contact with Columbia professor Richard Axel about her admission to Columbia’s graduate physics program. Alexa Staley graduated from Columbia with a doctorate in physics in 2015. Staley, who failed in 2025 to overturn a lifetime ban imposed by the British financial regulator, has insisted his daughter’s achievements were earned on merit (The Bowdoin Orient, February 6, 2026).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state an enrollment figure, acceptance rate, or endowment value for Bowdoin; those appeared only as snippet-level leads. It does not assert the college’s current ranking or any superlative about its standing. The Epstein-related claims are limited to what the reporting establishes: documents show contacts and mentions, not conclusions about wrongdoing, and the Mitchell Institute and Queen’s University Belfast each stopped short of making any finding of wrongdoing by Mitchell. Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Pierce are widely associated with the college’s 1820s graduating classes, but no fully read source in this pass confirmed those details, so they are not claimed here. The college’s official position on the Mamdani campaign is silence by policy; nothing is inferred from that silence.