The UC system announced July 16 that it would bestow honorary degrees to about 400 former UC students of Japanese descent who were shipped off to internment camps during World War II.

The Board of Regents, in making this exception to a long-standing policy against honorary degrees, is trying to make amends to aging Japanese Americans whose educations were cut short decades ago—including some who had attended UC Davis.

UC President Mark G. Yudof said in a statement that the the step was "long overdue" and described the incident as a "historical tragedy."

"To the surviving students themselves, and to their families, I want to say, 'This is one way to apologize to you. It will never be possible to erase what happened, but we hope we can provide you a small measure of justice,' " Yudof said.

UC Davis law professor Dan Simmons co-chaired a UC task force that examined the issue and made the recommendation. The diplomas will bear the inscription Inter Silvas Academi Restituere Iustitiam—or "to restore justice among the groves of the academe."

UC protested internments

Authorities herded more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into internment camps months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941—which brought the United States into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 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.

UC estimates that about 700 students were pulled from four campuses—Davis, Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Franciscos. Of those 700, 15 were from UC Davis, according to Leslie Sepuka of the UC Office of the President.

Three hundred of the 700 students eventually went on to receive UC degrees after the war—though no data were available on how many of the 15 UC Davis students were among those, she added.

At the time, UC faculty and administrators protested the inclusion of students in the internment. They arranged for some students to complete the semester's course work from internment camps and helped other students enroll in universities outside the exclusion zone. 

UC is encouraging family members and others to help identify students who were unable to graduate because of internment; information should be directed by telephone to  510-987-0239 or e-mail to HonoraryDegree@ucop.edu.