Editor's note: Tickets are required to the following ceremony. However, people can watch the event live and later on demand at commencementvideo.ucdavis.edu.

UC Davis' recognition ceremony for World War II-era Japanese American students has been scheduled for 10 a.m. Dec. 12 in The Pavilion at the Activities and Recreation Center.

The honorees are those students for whom World War II internment derailed their education. As of Dec. 3, seven honorees have told UC Davis officials they expect to attend the ceremony.

The UC system comprised four campuses at the time of the internment order — Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles and San Francisco — and each is organizing a ceremony in December or in the spring to award honorary degrees to the affected former students.

During the ceremonies, the campuses also plan to acknowledge former students who were interned but returned to UC to finish their degrees.

Dan Simmons, a UC Davis law professor and Academic Senate vice chair, and Judy Sakaki, UC vice president for student affairs and former UC Davis vice chancellor for student affairs, led the task force that supported the effort to award the degrees. Sakaki’s parents and grandparents were interned.

Awarding the honorary degrees is “the right thing to do” and will provide some justice for those whose lives were altered, states Simmons on a UCOP Web site.

UC: Leading voice of protest

The UC Board of Regents voted last summer to authorize the honorary degrees. About 700 students withdrew from UC in 1942 when the government ordered their internment — sending them to camps with more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

In all, about 3,500 Japanese Americans were prohibited from attending universities and colleges during the war. At the time, many in the UC academic community criticized the internments. UC President Robert Sproul was a leading voice of protest, according to “Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians,” a 1982 U.S. congressional report.

Receiving degrees

Former students who may be eligible, their families or friends are encouraged to contact individual UC campuses about receiving honorary degrees. Even after the ceremonies, those who are eligible (or their families if the recipient has passed away) can still receive an honorary degree.

More information is available online at http://honorary.universityofcalifornia.edu.
 

Harry Mok, a principal editor in the UC Office of the President's Integrated Communications group, contributed to this report.