Interned Japanese American UC students to receive honorary degrees
Grace Amemiya (center) and her nieces Liz Nakamura and Janet Teel witness the historic vote of UC Regents to award honorary degrees to WWII student internees. Photo/Zina Mirsky, UCSF
Hundreds of men and women who were placed in internment camps during World War II and unable to complete their UC educations will receive honorary degrees.
Approximately 700 students enrolled at UC campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Davis were removed from the West Coast in 1942 when Japanese Americans and nationals were sent to internment camps. All those former students, living and deceased, will receive the honorary degrees, which will bear the inscription "Inter Silvas Academi Restituere Lustitiam" – "to restore justice among the groves of the academe."
After Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorized military commanders to exclude all people of Japanese ancestry from "military areas," including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington.
At the time, UC faculty and administrators protested the inclusion of students in the order. They helped some students finish course work from the camps and others to enroll in universities outside the exclusion zone. After the war, some students completed their studies and earned degrees at UC, but the majority did not.
On July 16, UC Regents agreed to grant the honorary degrees to those students on the recommendation of a UC task force co-chaired by Vice President of Student Affairs Judy Sakaki and UC Davis law professor Daniel Simmons.
"The vote for honorary degrees fills my heart with joy," said one of the former students, Aiko "Grace" Obata Amemiya, who traveled from her home in Iowa to witness the Regents' historic action.
Help locate UC students who were WWII internees.
Contact via e-mail: HonoraryDegree@ucop.edu or call (510) 987-0239.
"I'm glad the university is recognizing that what the government did was wrong, and now my classmates and I can finally take our place as full-fledged UC alumni," said Amemiya, 88. She was studying nursing at UC San Francisco when she and her family were sent to a camp in Arizona. She earned a nursing degree at a Minnesota university and served in the Army Nurse Corps. But she always dreamed of having a UC degree.
The details of bestowing the honorary degrees are being worked out, and UC is trying to track down former students who are eligible to receive the degrees.