University of Montana: Light and Truth at the Edge of the Wilderness

The University of Montana sits at the base of Mount Sentinel on the eastern edge of Missoula, with the Clark Fork River on one side and a wilderness that runs essentially unbroken to Canada on the other. The location is not incidental to what the university became.

Missoula won the legislative vote for the new university in February of eighteen ninety-three, beating out rival Montana cities that wanted the institution for themselves. Classes began in eighteen ninety-five in a borrowed building. The university moved to its current campus by eighteen ninety-nine, and in nineteen hundred it adopted its motto: Lux et Veritas, Latin for light and truth.

What the university became, over the following century, had a great deal to do with its surroundings. The forestry program, established in nineteen thirteen, was among the first in the nation and was driven by the reality that millions of acres of national forest surrounded the town. The creative writing program became one of the most distinguished in the country, shaped by the landscape and isolation that drew writers here. The novelist and poet James Welch, whose work gave voice to the Blackfeet experience with precision and power, came out of the university's literary culture. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, who voted against both World Wars and remained an antiwar activist until her death in nineteen seventy-three, grew up in the state the university was built to serve.

More recent alumni include the actor J.K. Simmons, who won the Academy Award for his role in Whiplash, and the Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament, who grew up in Big Sandy, Montana and learned that you could be serious about art in a place most people drove through without stopping.

The Grizzlies football team has won two national championships at the Division One subdivision level, in nineteen ninety-five and two thousand one. In a state without a professional franchise to root for, the Griz are a serious matter.