From UCLA
He's a Harvard Ph.D., a onetime researcher at M.I.T., a former top scientist with the Air Force and an ex-deputy director of a secret government satellite program, as well as a retired executive of an engineering corporation. So why at 86 is Bob Naka returning to Westwood to pick up a belated Bruin degree? He's one of 75 Japanese Americans shoved out of the school and sent to internment during World War II. The university is making a concerted effort -- and props to the U for that -- to get these Nisei and their families back in May to award then degrees denied in that historic wrong. Naka, who went to the Manzanar camp, got the aid of a teacher there and enrolled inland, earning degrees at Missouri, Minnesota and then in Cambridge, Mass. As he describes it in a nifty online feature, he went from being considered as a potentially disloyal and untrustworthy American because of his Japanese descent into some of the most trusted and secret posts with his government in a lifetime.
Concerted effort under way to right a historic wrong for Nisei students
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