Joanne Kumamoto - Father disappointed and suffered life long impact due to lack of degree
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- 1 2021-04-12T15:34:54-07:00 Mirelle Raza e3ca98ff36c2e56f4d4f4ca8144ae83c6b02eb68 Oral Histories Sara Zollner 18 gallery 2021-05-05T16:43:16-07:00 Sara Zollner c352c6ccea0f5c8d33f4d54fe82885dbf683eed7
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Honorary Degrees
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The push for honorary degrees followed a similar path as the movement for Japanese reparations in the 1970s and 1980s, and represents another key point in rectifying past wrongs.
Honorary degrees are to universities what reparations were to the federal government: an opportunity to acknowledge and atone for the role the institutions played in violating the rights of a marginalized community. During internment, the Issei lost property and livelihood, whereas many Nisei had their education interrupted or ended. Reparations are a symbolic way to address the former, whereas honorary degrees are a symbolic way to address the latter.
The importance of honorary degrees to universities generally indicates the importance of conferring honorary degrees to Nisei students specifically. Honorary degrees are a good way to measure the general values of universities conferring them. They offer for universities a way to recognize achievements and individuals important to their community, but also to entice celebrity and media attention, encourage donors, and improve the reputation of the institution. Because of those goals, the decision to confer honorary degrees to Nisei students not only acts as a symbolic gesture for the students themselves, but also as a public statement of a university’s stance on Japanese internment and the marginalization of their students.
For those reasons, Japanese activists and their allies formed coalitions and lobbied the California government to pass legislation conferring honorary degrees to Nisei students at California colleges when internment began. As with the organizing efforts for reparations, Japanese activists worked with Japanese lawmakers. In October 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 37 into law. The bill required CSUs and community colleges to issue honorary degrees to Nisei students whose studies had been interrupted by internment. The degrees had to be given to both students still alive and posthumously to those who were no longer alive. The UCs and private schools were encouraged to issue honorary degrees as well, though they were not required to. Within a year of AB 37 going into effect, every community college, CSU, and UC, along with several private schools, had issued honorary degrees to their former Nisei students, or to their families if the Nisei student had already passed away. For more information on activism for honorary degrees at USC, click here.
Sources:
Karen W. Arenson, Recognizing Achievement, Adding Glitz, NY Times (May 31, 1999), https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/31/nyregion/recognizing-achievement-adding-glitz.html?pagewanted=1.
Assem. Bill 37, 2009-2010 Reg. Sess., ch. 7, 2009 Cal. Stat., https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=200920100AB37.
UC Honorary Degrees, https://honorary.universityofcalifornia.edu/htmlversion.html.The CSU Nisei Diploma Project, The California State University, https://www2.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/alumni/Honorary-Degrees/Nisei-Diploma-Project
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Documentary and Oral History
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Introduction
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In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s executive order 9066 allowed for the abuse of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals on the West Coast. The victims of this decision, majority of whom were United States citizens, were pulled from their homes, forced to turn over their belongings, and imprisoned. Japanese community leaders were rounded up by the federal government and taken to federal prison, where they waited for months to see a judge and clear their names. Once they had proved they had not committed acts of disloyalty they were taken to join the approximately 120,000 Japanese victims in internment camps across California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.
The victims of these heinous acts by the United States government included Japanese American college students, who were forced to leave their studies before completing the Spring 1942 semester.. This group is often referred to as Nisei, which identifies second generation Japanese Americans. The victims included 121 USC Nisei students.
Japanese victims were released in different waves throughout the internment years. A push to release Japanese American college students was led by California university presidents, including University of California President Robert Gordon Sproul. University of Southern California President, Rufus Von Kleinsmid, was not part of this group. The educators sent a letter to President Roosevelt requesting the release of students and stated “unless some special action is taken, the education of those who might become influential leaders of the loyal American born Japanese will abruptly be closed. Such a result would be injurious not only to them, but to the nation.” President Roosevelt did approve the release of some 4,300 Japanese American college students, but required them to complete their studies at an inland institution. All together the Japanese internment camps lasted approximately three years, with the last victims of Japanese internment being held until March 1946. (Roger Daniels)
After the internment camps ended, former USC students attempted to rejoin the college to resume their studies, however none of the 121 students were allowed to return to USC. Whats more, a number of USC departments refused to forward the students’ transcripts to other universities or claimed the transcripts had been lost, forcing Nisei students to start their education over or resulted in the Nisei’s never completing a college degree. There is evidence this effort to punish Nisei students for their Japanese heritage was supported by USC President Richard Von Kliensmid and USC Dental School Dean Ford. Despite this occurring in the 1940’s, USC Nisei students suffered from the impact of losing their education for the rest of their lives. Even decades after the internment camps, Nisei were unable to gain access to their transcripts. One USC Nisei, who had only been a final away from graduating before being imprisoned, attempted to return to USC in the 1960’s to complete his degree, however He was forced to attend UC Riverside, a school that granted him good-faith credit for the courses he had taken at USC two decades prior.
Our project aims to explore what happened in the years after WWII, outline the steps that have been taken in an effort to get justice for USC Nisei students, illuminate the excuses given and barriers put in place by USC, and the impact of these decades of trauma on the Nisei students and their families. We hope that as a result of this research project the University of Southern California will issue an apology to the Nisei students they have repeatedly abandoned, will award posthumous degrees to the families of the USC Nisei, and provide legacy scholarships to the decedents of USC Nisei.