2006 PRESIDENT'S REPORT

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR

Undergraduate Update • A proposal written by UM biology professors Bill Holben and Carol Brewer earned a $1.5 million grant for UM from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private supporter of science education. The grant will be used to revamp the undergraduate curriculum in the Division of Biological Sciences. The revised curriculum will be injected with more math and computer science, as well as more hands-on experiential learning and components of communication studies and ethics. The grant also will provide opportunities for faculty members and allow undergraduates with little or no research experience to work in laboratories alongside doctoral students, post-docs and faculty members.

Rowing Boats • The discovery of a crew boat in storage inspired the rebirth of the UM Rowing Club. The club has 20 active participants, most of whom have no crew experience, and they practice frequently at Salmon Lake. In addition to the 40-foot, four-person University boat, the club uses a 60-foot, eight-person boat on loan from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. After just weeks of practice, the men’s and women’s teams competed against teams from across the Northwest in the Head of the Spokane Regatta, a 5-kilometer race sponsored by Gonzaga University.

‘Best Buy’ and More • The University was recognized for its great educational opportunities and affordable tuition in publications by the Princeton Review and Barron’s. UM was included in the Princeton Review’s current edition of “The Best 361 Colleges,” as well its list of “Best Western Colleges,” “Colleges with a Conscience: 81 Great Schools with Outstanding Community Involvement” and, for the first time, its “America’s Best Value Colleges.” The University also was included in the 9th edition of Barron’s “Best Buys in College Education.”

Students Make a Difference with Pardon Project • During World War I, Herman Bausch was an outspoken German-born farmer living in Yellowstone County. On April 13, 1918, he told a county committee, “I won’t do anything voluntary to aid this war. I don’t care who wins this war. I would rather see Germany win than England or France. I am not prepared to say whether Germany is in the right. We should have never entered this war...”

Those words were enough to land Bausch in prison for four to 10 years.

The farmer was one of 78 people convicted of sedition during 1918-19, when Montana was ruled by perhaps the harshest anti-speech law ever passed by any state in the history of the United States. The punishments for these Montanans were prison sentences up to 20 years and maximum fines of $20,000.

In 2006 more than a dozen law and journalism students at UM prepared petitions for posthumous pardons from Gov. Brian Schweitzer for those found guilty under the old sedition law. The students were inspired to take up the cause by UM journalism Professor Clem Work, who recently published “Darkest Before Dawn: Sedition and Free Speech in the American West,” a book detailing Montana’s draconian sedition law.

The law students participating in the Montana Sedition Project – also called the Pardon Project – are part of the law school’s criminal defense clinic taught by Adjunct Assistant Professor Jeff Renz. The students spent a semester researching whether the pardons were legal, as well as whether those convicted of sedition had other criminal convictions that would interfere with a pardon.

In addition, the students tracked down descendants of the convicted and discovered that the convictions had serious repercussions for many of the families, some of whom are still recovering from the shame and secrecy two or three generations later. Many families were torn apart after a mother or father was sent to prison, and often the families didn't know what crimes their loved ones were charged with.

On May 3 the students and the descendants of some of those imprisoned for sedition gathered with Gov. Brian Schweitzer in the rotunda of the Montana State Capitol in Helena for a pardoning ceremony. Schweitzer greeted the descendants with an introduction about righting old wrongs. “To those of you who are here to honor your ancestors, I say to you: They were patriots. For those of you who have traveled a long distance to Montana, welcome,” he said. “Welcome home.”

For law student Katie Olson, meeting the relatives and discovering that some of them hadn’t even known their family member had been in prison was revealing. “It really spoke of what a dark period it was,” she said. “The personal impact really drove home the importance of what we had done.”

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