Harvard Grants Honorary Degree to Former Berkeley Prof Known as Anti-Israel Zealot

Harvard University has given an honorary degree to a retired UC Berkeley professor who is a fierce advocate for boycotting Israel.

Elaine H. Kim, who has a long history of anti-Israel activism, was among the six honorary degree recipients Harvard awarded during Harvard’s ceremony on Thursday.

The retired Berkeley professor is notably listed as an endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), which seeks to systematically destroy the world’s only Jewish state through financial means, by boycotting companies that do business with Israel.

USACBI “focuses on mobilizing support for the academic and cultural boycott, and on organizing U.S. academics” by inviting academic scholars and students “to endorse the boycott as a first step toward showing public solidarity and building a national boycott movement, in tandem with the larger BDS movement,” the campaign states on its website.

The organization also encourages “academics, academic associations/unions, and academic — as well as other — institutions around the world” to “boycott and/or work towards the cancellation or annulment of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli academic institutions or that otherwise promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy.”

USACBI works alongside several international academic boycott organizations, as well as in collaboration with Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and other student activists developing academic boycott and divestment campaigns of Israel.

But “Kim’s anti-Israel activism long precedes the current war,” the Editors reported, citing the former Berkeley professor signing a public letter in 2003 claiming Israel would use the Iraq War “to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing.”

During the Ivy League school’s honorary degree ceremony on Thursday, Harvard provost John Manning praised Kim for her “fervent commitment to community service.” “We honor professor Elaine Kim,” Manning said.

The university’s president, Alan Garber, meanwhile, read Kim’s citation for her “doctor of laws” degree, stating, “dynamic in devotion to building community, she sees that making waves can help raise the tide.”

Harvard, which has been plagued with antisemitism scandals following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and massacre of Jews in the world’s only Jewish State, is in the midst of a battle with the Trump administration that could result in the Ivy League school losing billions of dollars in federal funding and its tax exempt status.

“If Harvard knew [of Kim’s Israel boycott advocacy] and went ahead with it anyway, it represents an extraordinary recklessness,” the Editors reporter Ira Stoll wrote.

“There’s a whole world out there of people that Harvard can choose to honor with an honorary degree,” Stoll added, noting that “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,” Stoll said.

Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.