Yale University on Monday bestowed an honorary degree on a Canadian anti-Israel activist, Ingrid Mattson, who in June 2025 signed a letter to the Canadian prime minister falsely accusing Israel of "genocide" in Gaza and calling on Canada to impose extensive sanctions on Israel. In 2024 she also signed another letter saying Canada should arrest leaders of the Israeli government "should any suspects arrive on Canadian territory."
The 2025 letter also calls for investigations into Canadian nonprofits, part of a demonization and harassment campaign against Jewish summer camps that employ Israeli counselors. It calls for an arms embargo against Israel at a moment when Israel was facing threats from Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthi terrorists dedicated to its destruction. It calls for an end to a Canada-Israel trade agreement and for unspecified sanctions against Israeli politicians.
In honoring Mattson, who converted to Islam from Catholicism, Yale’s president, Maurie McInnis, described her as a "bridge builder, and champion of peace." McInnis praised her "integrity" and "wisdom." McInnis addressed Mattson directly, according to the Yale website, saying, "Compassionate and powerful force for good in a troubled world, Yale wishes you a thousand blessings as it honors you with the degree of Doctor of Divinity."
The biography of Mattson on the Yale website describes her as a "distinguished Canadian scholar, activist, and former president of the Islamic Society of North America."
As president of the Islamic Society of North America from 2006 to 2010, Mattson launched a dialogue with a Reform Jewish group. Yet after October 7, 2023, she has taken a more publicly strident anti-Israel position.
The June 9, 2025 letter she signs refers to "the Occupied Palestinian Territory including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel." It calls for "sanctions against key Israeli government officials suspected of responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Defence Israel Katz, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich." It calls on Prime Minister Carney to "withdraw from the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement." It demands that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police "launch investigations into allegations that Canadian citizens and organizations incorporated in and based in Canada have committed, or aided and abetted the commission of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity in Israel or Palestine, including while serving with the Israel Defense Forces, with the specific aim of prosecuting alleged perpetrators."
The day after that letter, Canada announced sanctions against two of the Israeli cabinet ministers, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
The honorary degree to Mattson comes as some voices at Yale have been urging a sharper focus on research and teaching rather than on left-wing political activism. An April 2026 "Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education" began by saying that "Universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge," and warned that "diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust." It also said, "Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship."
Yale’s Ivy League rival, Harvard, gave an honorary degree in May 2025 to a boycott-Israel activist, Elaine Kim, a retired University of California, Berkeley professor with a decades-long history of extreme anti-Israel activism. After I wrote about it, the university put out a statement reaffirming what it said was its opposition to academic boycotts and making clear that "In granting an honorary degree, Harvard University is not endorsing the political views of the recipient."
The Yale Daily News reports that the university issued a May 15 press release with the names of seven of the eight honorands, omitting only Mattson, who was the first honorary degree recipient at the commencement ceremony. The student newspaper quoted a university official, Karen Peart, who said the decision "honored each of their personal choices for inclusion in advance coverage about their degree."
Vice President JD Vance and Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all have Yale degrees but have not been honored with honorary doctorates, perhaps because they are conservatives who have not publicly abandoned Christianity for Islam. Yale Law School did not hang a portrait of Thomas in its halls until six years after it was completed, even though portraits of graduates who go on to become Supreme Court justices are to be hung automatically. It was hung after the Free Beacon drew attention to the fact that the school had accepted a donation to commission the portrait—but never hung it up, in keeping with its broader failure to honor conservative graduates while heaping praise and honorary degrees on left-wing activists.
The whole episode encapsulates how disastrously some of these supposedly elite institutions have lost their way, and how difficult it will be for them to get back on course. They understand that secularism alone is an insufficient keel for an educational institution, so they look to religious sources for wisdom and definitions of good. Yet they have no common framework for evaluating the truth or merit of the various religious traditions, so they just reach for whichever ones match their own secular left-wing political beliefs.
A professor at Harvard Divinity School, Jon D. Levenson, gets into this a bit in a recent published dialogue with a professor at Princeton, Robert P. George. Levenson asks, "can we really determine what the best is purely through a dialectical process of truth-seeking and without relying on particular cultural traditions? … In educational institutions that are religiously pluralistic and welcome secular persons as well, can we really reach a reasonable degree of consensus on the things that ‘ultimately matter’ and on the practices necessary to internalize and perpetuate them in the lives of the students? … doesn’t every educational community committed to more than just imparting practical skills have to be founded on some particular vision and thus to exclude (however respectfully) some of the worldviews available in the larger society?"
Levenson goes on, "I do worry, though, about the sustainability of the modern secular model of education that limits itself to the cognitive dimension (the acquisition of skills and knowledge) and ignores the soul, so to speak. This strikes me as creating a dangerous vacuum, one many students fill with that ‘pre-professional rat race’ you mentioned, but others—equally instrumentalist in their approach—fill with an absolutistic, dogmatic, solipsistic, and self-righteous form of political activism. This, in turn, provides them with a sense of a higher purpose and group identity and enables them to excommunicate dissenters (consider the signs on campuses reading 'Zionists not welcome here') and to shame and shun sinners. In other words, I worry that secularization may, ironically, have opened the door to religion at its worst and helped reenergize hoary forms of religious (and anti-religious) bigotry."
In a 2013 interview with Commonweal, Mattson describes a childhood in Waterloo, Ontario, as a devout Catholic: "I would go to church every day during Lent on my lunch break, and in Advent I would go more. In those days little kids were allowed to go around by themselves, so I would just go. Very often I would go by myself to do the Stations of the Cross. I was really into it."
Then, as the Commonweal account has it, on a college trip to France, "she befriended a group of Muslim students from Senegal and Mauritania she met at an outdoor concert. They were her first exposure to Islam. She followed them to West African dance clubs and listened to them discuss authors they were reading, including Frantz Fanon and his impassioned indictment of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth. Mattson was captivated by the group’s company and conversation. ‘A lot of them spoke Arabic to each other even if that wasn’t their mother tongue.’"
Yale’s graduation ceremony, at which Mattson’s honorary degree was bestowed, was disrupted by anti-Israel protesters who hoisted banners during the ceremony, including one that read, "These degrees conferred in blood." The banners were in English, not Arabic, but check back in a few years.
