In the first move of its kind since the early 1970s, the University of California at San Francisco has given honorary degrees to 68 Japanese American students who were forced to leave the campus because of the internment of West Coast-based Japanese Americans during World War II after the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The UC system had originally imposed a moratorium since 1972 on giving honorary degrees, and considering that many of these former students have now passed away, this is long overdue. It’s sobering and maddening to think how these 68 students were unfairly forced to leave one of the top health science universities in the country all because of unfounded racist policies, and to imagine what they could’ve done in their chosen fields had they been allowed to stay and complete their degrees.
As a current 1st year student pharmacist at UCSF, it is heartening to see that UCSF is encouraging diversity, from having the first Filipina American in the US be the head of an academic department at a university (Kathleen Giacomini in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences), to seeing other people of color take prominent leadership roles at the campus. Even though what UCSF is doing is mostly symbolic, such gestures show that UC is at least trying to make amends with the past (even if they are forcing all their current students to pay huge fee increases–sigh).
