HOMECOMING 2000

Greetings from the President
This issue of the Montanan focuses on the most critical factor in the success of any university: its teachers. An institution succeeds when the students who graduate find that the education they receive prepared them well for meaningful and rewarding lives. Research clearly shows that interactions with excellent and demanding faculty outweigh any other contributing factor.

Students who have attended The University of Montana over the years have enjoyed the benefit of studying and learning under the guidance of a dedicated and committed faculty. In this issue, you will establish or renew your acquaintance with several of these dedicated people.

I read these comments with keen interest. The graduates who wrote them attended the University over a considerable period of time. Nonetheless, their descriptions of the Montana experience have much in common. I believe you will conclude, as I did, that the University’s reputation for involving students in learning derives from and rests with the willingness of faculty members to engage the students in their own passions. And those passions have not attenuated over time, but have grown stronger.

I especially appreciated the comments about faculty members whom I knew personally during my years as a student in the 1960s. Ruth Carrington captured nicely the air of excitement and fascination that Leslie Fiedler gave to literature. I also found Ira Lax’s description of Jules Karlin in the classroom directly on the mark. Because of the work of these distinguished faculty members over the years, generations of students have learned and loved and accomplished. UM enjoys the love and support of its alumni because of these people.

I know you will enjoy this opportunity to revisit the campus and get to know more about some of the faculty you did not meet when you studied here. If you wish to share your experiences and perceptions, please send them along.

George M. Dennison
President

Casting Call
Last spring and summer Montana Repertory Theatre Director Greg Johnson and media arts Professor James Kriley were looking for the lead actress for the Rep’s new touring show, “The Diary of Anne Frank.” They auditioned an estimated forty actresses, including several equity players. “We went to Seattle, and we went through all of our files and we couldn’t find anybody,” said Johnson. “We found a lot of good people, but not the right one.”

Then Johnson auditioned ’99 UM alumna Tara Sullivan, who moved to New York to pursue her dream but had returned to act in “Charlie Russell’s Montana.” He had found his Anne Frank. “She has that wonderful combination of innocence and intelligence that is essential to the play – someone as remarkable and intellectually developed as Anne Frank,” says Johnson.

Sullivan played “Scout” in the Rep’s long-running national tour of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” After that tour she moved to New York where she was waitressing and attending classes at the Circle in the Square Theatre School.

“The Diary of Anne Frank” opens in Missoula December 5 and will have a two-week run here before it begins a four-month national tour. Johnson reports that the Rep has booked “the most dates we’ve had ever” for this tour.

Kriley is directing the production, from a newly adapted script by Wendy Kesselman. “It’s a more contemporary play,” Johnson says. “It has a new flavor to it.”

ROTC Roars
There was a Grizzly roar in Bozeman this fall that had nothing to do with sports. It was from UM’s Grizzly Battalion ROTC, which won the Big Sky Task Force Ranger Challenge 2000, a grueling competition among five university ROTCs.

The Ranger Challenge comprises six events that run nonstop for twelve hours, including a physical fitness test, grenade assault course, rope bridge river crossing, a 10K “ruck run,” orienteering and weapons disassembly/assembly races. Competing against Boise State, Idaho State, Ricks College and Montana State University, UM won four of six events.

Officer in Charge Major Eric Kettenring was impressed with his team’s performance. He said, “These cadets embody the heart and soul of this program. They truly strive to do their best through intense teamwork.”

NIH Funds UM Research Center
UM just got “brainier.” A $7-million start-up grant from the National Institutes of Health will establish a new center at UM for the study of brain function and disease, the Center of Biomedical Research Excellence.

“This is a huge award in terms of dollars and impact,” says UM pharmaceutical sciences Professor Richard Bridges. The center will focus on investigating the way brain cells function at the biochemical level and how those functions change following injury or disease, such as stroke or Alzheimer’s. UM neuroscientists will work with the Montana Neuroscience Institute at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula and researchers in laboratories at MSU and the McLaughlin Research Institute in Great Falls.

UM to Stay the Course
A budget crisis that arose during the fall semester at UM appeared to be lessening as we went to press. Provost and Vice Presi-dent for Academic Affairs Lois Muir reports that, despite budget challenges that appeared to necessitate the laying off of many adjunct professors in early October, education at UM will stay the course for spring semester 2001.

Muir reports that about twenty adjunct faculty members will not return to teach in the spring, but impact felt by students will be minimal because careful planning has gone into retaining class availability.

The faculty cuts are the latest in a series of hard hits UM has taken during a chronic fiscal crunch. Administration and finance, student services and research experienced significant cuts earlier this academic year. Previously, money from faculty and administrative pay raises and the faculty computing fund has been re-channeled to academics.

“The class availability is similar to last spring,” Muir says. “We will have the courses that students need, and they will be able to get into the classes they need.”

An introductory math course will show the most change, with students channeled into three lecture-style classes. Muir says students will have an additional hour each week to interact with instructors. Other courses have less dramatic increases, with class sizes typically increasing by one to seven students.

A small reprieve for the English department came in the form of a $115,000 donation in early November. The anonymous donor made the gift in response to an outcry of protest against the adjunct situation.

While administrators appreciate the gift, they hope academic programs will not become reliant on private donations, but instead remain the responsibility of the state.

“The most constructive approach to this issue is to become active – to try to persuade our external constituencies that higher education in Montana in an important investment for the state,” Muir says. “I encourage everyone to join us in convincing the people of Montana that funding higher education is directly tied to the economic development and overall success of the state.”

J-School Rocks
UM’s J-School celebrated its first reunion at Homecoming 2000, bringing together about 200 alumni from classes 1941 to 2000. The journalists gathered at the J-School for an open house and attended two evening events, the highlight of which were talks by former Dean Nathaniel Blumberg and Professors Ed Dugan and Robert McGiffert.

Journalism Dean Jerry Brown, in welcoming the returning alumni, noted that the current journalism faculty has a combined 200 years of journalistic experience and lauded today’s students, saying they were as irreverent, disrespectful of authority, vain and nosy as the gathered alumni were before them. His remarks met with cheers from the crowd.

Organizer of the event Gary Sorensen ’57 noted that many of the alumni came back to show their appreciation for Dugan, McGiffert and Blumberg. While gathering for a group photo in front of the J-School, Blumberg was heard to remark, “It’s indescribable in that I still see the faces of the students in the returning graduates.”

UM Honors Distinguished Alumni
Six UM graduates have received Distinguished Alumni awards, the Alumni Association’s highest honor.

A Rhodes Scholar, W. Bruce Cook ’57 enjoyed a thirty-five-year career with Exxon Corp. and served on the UM Foundation board of trustees from 1991 until his death in August 1999. Mary Lou Cook accepted her husband’s award.

Bonnie Pitsch Dalton ’58, M.S. ’60, acting chief of the Life Sciences Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center, won the NASA Outstanding Leadership Award and was selected for the NASA Senior Executive Service Program.

James P. Lucas ’50, J.D. ’51, is president and senior attorney for the Lucas & Monaghan law firm in Miles City. He has served on the boards of Montana Power Co., Mountain States Legal Foundation, the National Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education and the UM Foundation.

Patty Holmes Myers ’70 has distinguished herself as a pioneer in classroom computer use, teaching first- and second-graders in Great Falls. In 1998 she was named Montana Educator of the year and received a Milken Foundation National Educator Award.

Dr. Raymond J. Rademacher ’52 practiced pediatrics for thirty-four years in Denver, winning the Pediatrician of the Year Award in 1996 from the Colorado Rocky Mountain Chapter of Pediatric Nurse Associates and Practitioners. This year he was elected a Career Teaching Scholar in UC’s pediatrics department.

A native of India, Livingston C. Soans, Ph.D. ’66 , was a Fulbright Scholar at UM, During the past thirty-four years he has introduced new technologies and crops that have made farming economically viable in his district in India and helped staunch the flow of young farmers to the cities.

The Great Montana Dog & Pony Show
More than fifty pieces of art, including life-size sculptures of dogs, ponies, cowboy boots and a grizzly (by renowned artist Rudy Autio) were auctioned off at the Great Montana Dog and Pony show held in the newly remodeled UC Ballroom. The event was attended by about 400 people. Proceeds will form the basis for a fundraising campaign aimed at providing a permanent home for UM’s 9,500-piece art collection.