For the average septuagenarian, the most important “social” event of the week might be at the local senior center. But for UC Davis senior lecturer emeritus Isao Fujimoto, achieving social change is an everyday — and lifetime — endeavor.

It is also why Fujimoto, 76, who helped found the Asian American Studies Program (one of the first in the country) and the Graduate Program in Community Development at UC Davis, put his dissertation aside for some 50 years.

Finally, on Feb. 1, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, upon the successful completion of his thesis on multiethnic efforts to organize immigrant communities in California’s Central Valley.

“What’s in focus here is how marginalized, unrecognized and diverse groups of immigrants within a setting of great contradictions can be energized to develop their communities,” Fujimoto wrote in his introduction.

“This dissertation is about tapping into the social capital that accumulates and grows among people as they interact with each other.”

Fujimoto’s dissertation in development sociology evolved from his boyhood. Like thousands of other people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, he and his parents — immigrant farmers on the Yakima Indian Reservation in eastern Washington — had been interned during World War II.

Wartime experiences

As a result, Fujimoto said, he learned “what it means to be isolated and treated in a way that’s not really fair. … I think the wartime experience is a reminder of what happens to people in a time of crisis, especially if they are marginalized and hindered from organizing. It’s very important that people really come together and realize the power that emerges when people start working together.”

His lifetime work of outreach to rural communities began during his time at UC Berkeley, where he served as chairman of delegation connecting with the student movement in Indonesia. Years later, while studying at Cornell University, he led a literacy project in Honduras.

How he got to Cornell is a story in and of itself, beginning with his service in the Korean War after being drafted into the Army.

“I was in Korea (as a correspondent) when the Soviet Union sent up Sputnik, and, when I got back, I found people scared and asking what was the country going to do to beat the Russians,” Fujimoto said. “Beefing up our high school science and math programs was the answer, and hence the programs to send high school science teachers for advanced training.”

Civil rights

As it so happened, Fujimoto had become a high school science teacher (in San Jose), and, in those post-Sputnik years, he attended a radiation biology program at Howard University, where he learned as much about civil rights at the historically black university as about science.

Then, in 1961, he completed a program for science teachers at Cornell, where he subsequently got involved in the Honduras literacy project and settled in to start a doctoral program researching village development in the Philippines.

But, while he was in the midst of organizing data for his dissertation in 1967, UC Davis recruited him to join the faculty and develop a program in community development.

‘Survivor, craftsman’

Putting his dissertation on hold, Fujimoto started an academic career working in rural sociology, farm labor issues, ethnic studies, social justice, and community, immigration and labor organizing, and working with the American Friends Service Committee, Food First, Rural America and countless other organizations.

When he retired in 1994, he revisited his dissertation.

“The dedication, commitment and focus of the people in organizations I’ve worked with have been a source of energy and inspiration that has kept me going. That’s what led me to not to give up on completing my Ph.D., even if it took nearly 50 years,” he said.

Charles Geisler, professor of development al sociology who was Fujimoto’s committee chair, said: “Isao is a survivor, a craftsman when it comes to applied scholarship and something of a legendary citizen among ethnic rural minority populations in the West.”

Jennifer Wholey is a writing intern for the Cornell Chronicle, in which this article originally appeared.