The University of Wisconsin at Madison dedicated a plaque on Friday to commemorate a physics graduate student who was killed in 1970, when antiwar activists detonated a car bomb outside the campus building where he was working on an experiment, the Associated Press reported. The student, 33-year-old Robert Fassnacht, was a pacifist and his work was unrelated to the military or to the Vietnam War. He left three small children.

Three of the four bombers, who were trying to destroy an Army research center elsewhere in the building, were caught, convicted, and jailed. All have served their sentences and been released, but they don’t often seem very remorseful. The fourth has remained on the FBI’s most-wanted list for more than three decades. The bombing itself remains a subject of bitter debate among critics of the bombers and of the war.

Mr. Fassnacht’s family members long opposed a memorial to him, but recently, at the urging of the university’s chancellor, John D. Wiley, who knew Mr. Fassnacht as a fellow graduate student, they reconsidered. —Andrew Mytelka