Harvard Gives Honorary Degree to Berkeley Boycott-Israel Advocate

Elaine Kim signed letter “refusing complicity in Israel’s literary institutions”

Boycott-Israel advocate and 2025 Harvard honorary doctorate recipient Elaine Kim seen in a screenshot from the Harvard Commencement ceremony this morning.

Harvard, which is in a fight with the Trump administration that could lose it billions of dollars of federal funding, its tax exempt status, and its ability to enroll international students, today awarded an honorary degree to a retired University of California, Berkeley professor with a decades-long history of extreme anti-Israel activism.

Among the six honorary degree recipients Harvard honored in its May 29 ceremony was Elaine H. Kim. Kim is listed as an endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which does things like protest against American appearances by Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. She is listed as a 2025 endorser of the effort to boycott the Batsheva Dance Company tour, signing a statement condemning it as an “attempt to artwash the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine.”

An image from the anti-Israel boycott campaign backed by Harvard honorary degree recipient Elaine Kim.

“The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), launched in 2004 and modelled after the anti-Apartheid South Africa campaign of the 1980s, calls the world community to uphold the comprehensive BOYCOTT of all cultural and academic institutions funded by the ‘state’ of Israel. As one such institution, Batsheva Dance Company is structurally complicit in Israel’s current campaign of death in Gaza and the West Bank. USACBI refuses to condone the artwashing of Israeli genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. We therefore call for a BOYCOTT of Batsheva’s 2025 U.S. tour, in this way standing with the Palestinian people in their unwavering struggle for justice, liberation, and full and equal rights. Free Palestine!!” says the 2025 statement endorsed by “Elaine H Kim, Professor Emerita UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies.”

Kim’s anti-Israel activism long precedes the current war. In 2003, Kim signed a public letter expressing concern that Israel would use the Iraq War “to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full- fledged ethnic cleansing."

“With an average of more than $10 million dollars per day of American tax dollars going to Israel, we believe Americans cannot remain silent while crimes as abhorrent as ethnic cleansing are being openly advocated. We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated,” the 2003 letter signed by Kim said.

Harvard provost John Manning praised Kim for her “fervent commitment to community service.”

“We honor professor Elaine Kim,” Manning said.

Harvard President Garber read her citation for her “doctor of laws” degree: “dynamic in devotion to building community, she sees that making waves can help raise the tide.”

It’s possible that Harvard did not know of Kim’s boycott-Israel advocacy, or it’s possible they knew of it and went ahead and gave her an honorary degree anyway. Either way, it is inexcusable.

If they did not know—I turned it up in a few seconds with a Google search—it means they had no one in their circle of advisers who knows that California ethnic studies is a swamp of antisemitism. That’s not an obscure fact to anyone who knows anything about contemporary education policy or the field of ethnic studies. Harvard’s own education policy journal, Education Next, published an entire article about it in 2021.

If Harvard knew and went ahead with it anyway, it represents an extraordinary recklessness. There’s a whole world out there of people that Harvard can choose to honor with an honorary degree. Yeshiva University gave an honorary degree this year to Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Hersh’s mother. For Harvard to honor someone using her scholarly reputation to participate in an effort to shun Israeli scholars and institutions and falsely accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza provides yet more evidence for those who say Harvard is not taking its antisemitism problem as seriously as it should. I guess you could argue that no political litmus test should prevent honoring someone for their scholarly accomplishments, but the boycott against Israel is inherently antisemitic. Would Harvard give an honorary degree to an accomplished scholar who was signing public petitions that were sexist or racist? And if not, isn’t the different standard for hating Jews, a willingness to overlook it, its own kind of discriminatory bias?

The names of honorary degree recipients other than the commencement speaker are traditionally kept secret at Harvard until the day of Commencement. That lack of transparency, typical for Harvard, prevents a crowdsourced vetting process. Honorary degree recipients typically have a Harvard faculty sponsor or nominee; it’s not clear who backed Kim, or whether her anti-Israel activism was known to that person.

This is only the latest in a recent series of Harvard Commencements to be marred by antisemitism. At Harvard’s 2024 Commencement, the honorary degree recipient and speaker Maria Ressa, “delivered off-the-cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power,” according to the report of Harvard’s own task force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, which described them as “seemingly antisemitic remarks” and observed, “In the Harvard audience she addressed, it may have seemed there was no cost to offending Jews.”

In 2022, the opening prayer of Harvard commencement was offered “in the name of Jesus, my radical brother, the 1st-century freedom fighter who knew enslavement, at the hands of oppressors and occupiers.” Captions on the large video screens flashed “first century Palestine’s freedom fighter.”

On May 26, 2025, President Trump called Harvard “very antisemitic.” Harvard has opportunities to demonstrate that that is false, but somehow, it manages to keep missing them. Harvard President Garber has been going around saying that there is a “kernel” of truth in Trump’s criticism. As the honorary degree to Kim shows, Garber and Penny Pritzker and their team of aides and lawyers are running the place in a manner that guarantees that the accusation will remain accurate.

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