College of San Mateo will celebrate its 87th commencement this Friday, May 29, welcoming back alum Assemblyman Warren Furutani (D-South Los Angeles County) as the special guest speaker and conferring 452 associate degrees on students from the Bay Area, Japan, Macau (China), South Korea and Taiwan. Exceptional student Richael Young, president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges and the recent recipient of the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke scholarship, will be the student speaker.

The already emotionally-charged event (many students will be the first in their families to earn a college degree and/or have overcome great obstacles to graduate) will take on an even greater significance with the conferring of honorary degrees to Japanese American students whose college studies were cut short after being interned in detention camps in the United States during World War ll.

According to the College’s Ethnics Studies Professor Lewis Kawahara, who spent hours searching college records to identify and contact affected individuals or their families, CSM will be the first community college to bestow the honorary degrees. His work was being done in parallel with that of Assemblyman Furutani who introduced this year AB 37 which would confer honorary degrees to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II and consequently unable to continue and complete their postsecondary education studies.

The graduation ceremony will begin at 6:30 pm in the campus’ large gymnasium (Building 8).
Please visit collegeofsanmateo.edu/map for a map of and directions to CSM.