Kent State a Year Later
Keller, Gordon W.
KENT STATE is a school that reflects mainstream sentiments in American life, and thus serves as a symbol of the pathology of the larger culture. This pathology may be understood in terms of...
...As it does so, it will increase its tendency to emphasize research at the expense of undergraduate teaching...
...Ill-equipped to control civilian crowds, they came in heavy trucks, with armored personnel carriers and M-1 rifles...
...There is no culture of radicalism at Kent, and little understanding of radicalism by leadership elites within or without the university...
...Civil authority at Kent clearly overreacted to student disorder, seeing in it "revolution, here and now" requiring suppression by gunfire...
...And the local grand jury exonerated the Guard, placing blame for the killings directly on the university administration...
...But when even a relatively small number of students visibly depart from traditional mores regarding work and play, love and sex, these departures are understood to be an attack on the American way of life when in fact they are not—at least not yet...
...What ought to be attacked is the gap between the university's role in society and public understanding of its mission, especially its responsibility to stand as a conscience speaking to the public and its problems...
...Convinced then and later that the town was about to be destroyed, that carloads of radical students were descending upon it, that students were armed and dangerous, the city called for the National Guard...
...At the university itself, ROTC remains on campus, to many a constant denial of the university's claim to neutrality...
...The local AAUP once noted about the president of Kent State that "pressed against his temple is the muzzle of a long shotgun that reaches to the state capitol...
...Why the earlier policy was reversed is not known, nor is there public appreciation of the policy change...
...Some are dirty and use foul language...
...Despite the Guard's presence, a carnivallike atmosphere developed on the campus and persisted during the burning of the ROTC building on Saturday night, through Sunday and into Monday...
...All the irritants in the public realm still exist...
...KENT STATE is a school that reflects mainstream sentiments in American life, and thus serves as a symbol of the pathology of the larger culture...
...Perhaps nothing illustrates so poignantly this lack of sensitivity as the interoffice memorandum reproduced here in full, with only certain names excised to protect sources...
...These essentially stylistic departures from traditional behavior have been perceived and acted upon as having immediate political motivation and consequence, though in reality they represent only changes in style...
...She was admitted to the College of Education the Fall Quarter, 1969, and transferred to the College of Fine and Professional Arts, January, 1970...
...Ironically, as the university "improves," it will probably do a worse job of preparing its students to live genuinely reflective and humane lives...
...This time, as the bars were ordered closed by nervous police, still more students came into the streets, many angry because they were unable to see the end of the Lakers' basketball game...
...Monday, confused and frightened Guardsmen fired at random into a crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine...
...The county prosecutor held a display of "weapons" seized on the campus, including ball bats, track NOTEBOOK starter pitsols, World War II souvenirs, and decongestants...
...Still, the campus shares the conservative Ohio political culture...
...g., new doctoral programs, Black Studies— without adequate financial resources, it is tempted to substitute rhetoric for reality...
...III KENT STATE TODAY looks much like any other Midwestern multiversity...
...A frightened city administration was seized by an invasion psychology...
...One must note as well the immense usefulness of the FBI report on the shootings, without which the struggle for public understanding would be impossible...
...And throughout the weekend, except for a few faculty members, the university remained isolated from events on the campus...
...Professional rabblerousers helped stir up trouble at Kent State University and then went on their way," a state senator and a high university administration official explained to the local Rotary Club on May 4, minutes before the shootings occurred...
...One sees at Kent State the difficulty any big institution has in responding humanely to change and crisis...
...Let me try...
...So we have here a university that is not all that liberal, let alone radical, being attacked by local citizens for its liberalism and permissiveness and by the other side as repressive and racist...
...They are marked by at titudes toward the whole political system, toward its essential fairness and legitimacy, and toward acceptable and unacceptable ways of expressing approval or disapproval of the system...
...Reconstruction of what did happen last May 4 is difficult...
...National Guard spokesmen testified before the Scranton Commission that the Ohio Guard does not fire warning shots as they could be "dangerous...
...11 FOLLOWING President Nixon's Thursday speech on Cambodia, students on a warm Friday evening spilled from bars in the compacted downtown area, breaking windows to the tune of about $50,000 and throwing bottles at passing police cars...
...Working on many programs simultaneouslye...
...To this day, it is not quite clear who held operational responsibility for decision-making during that time...
...Established communications networks between city and campus collapsed in the early moments of panic, and since then have remained in disrepair...
...Though it may be fair to describe Kent State as "unexceptional," neither is it an intellectual wasteland...
...The killings were not in any direct sense politically inspired...
...While the Scranton Commission pronounced the shootings unnecessary and unwarranted, the Nixon administration was busy repudiating that Commission...
...Though this was obviously a breach of military discipline, there is little reason to expect the responsible officers to answer for their incompetence...
...Perhaps the best recent example of this public-relations consciousness is the university's denial of a request by National Educational Television to do a live show on campus unrest with the panel discussion originating on campus...
...What ought most to be attacked, however, are the problems of bureaucratic ineptitude, the mindless persistence in routine behavior, which afflicts both the larger society and the university itself...
...The explanation is to be found, once again, in the political culture...
...Thus the campus is marked by a striking homogeneity of interest, values, and attitudes...
...Coming from lower-middleclass families, some 85 percent of them from Ohio, they have strong vocational orientations...
...Kent is caught, as are so many big universities, without adequate public financial support and without sympathetic understanding by the public of the role of the university...
...The local judge (unopposed for reelection) then slapped a gag on all public discussion of the jury's findings, permitting President Robert I. White to "comment but not criticize" the report...
...A football riot is familiar and understandable...
...After the disturbances, the mayor paid tribute to the National Guard, saying they deserved a "great deal of credit" for NOTEBOOK preventing further damage and injury...
...My argument, by contrast, is that the underlying causal factors at Kent State are more diffuse and apolitical than is generally realized...
...with an eye on a tough senatorial primary race coming up two days later, he proclaimed a state of emergency, inveighed against radicals who were "worse than the brownshirts," and left the campus after having prohibited all assembly...
...A certain leaven in the mixture is provided by the presence of new faculty, about one-half of the total number of 1,000 having been hired within the past three or four years...
...Promotions within administrative structures reinforce the inbreeding...
...Students sit on steps of buildings downtown, and this bothers the local people who then fear to do business there...
...The town overreacted...
...This also applies to Kent...
...The practice in Kent under the last city administration was to notify all barowners that trouble was brewing downtown, whereupon drinks would be on the house for a short time and students kept off the streets...
...The Kent city police chief attributed the disorders to "Communist agitators," and later described the ACLU as comprised of pinkoes and reds...
...For most of Kent's 21,000 students, politics simply is not salient...
...Ohio's Governor James Rhodes' office reported that he received more mail on the Kent shootings than on any other single issue during his eight years in office, and that 85 percent of the mail strongly supported the National Guard...
...After the shootings, not only was the university closed down, but public and parochial schools were closed at police request on May 4, and remained closed for two days...
...Girls hitchhike...
...Both tend to be status-quo oriented...
...Some of the motivation for this spring activism and destruction was surely anger at the invasion of Cambodia, though the tendency to be drawn in by the momentum of events must also be taken into account...
...Despite the blood and ink spilled at Kent, it would be incorrect to see the Kent disorders as a manifestation of rising political consciousness among young people...
...The May 1-4 disorders will not likely be repeated, but not because of increased vigilance or sensitivity by the state or the university...
...Public sentiment, not only in local Portage County, but apparently countrywide, is running strongly against students...
...They brought with them to Kent not only their fatigue but also their envy and anger against people of their own age who enjoyed social and educational advantages they lacked...
...For example, in the fall quarter, despite a curricular option allowing course credit for political participation in lieu of regular classes, less than 15 Kent students chose to participate in the recent elections...
...It will be a sadder irony should political and educational leaders conclude that the peace was achieved by the killing...
...The campus political culture reflects the larger state political culture...
...understanding is still more so...
...But the whole affair has been so bizarre that the words "bureaucratic inepititude" are hardly rich enough to describe what has happened here...
...While such crowd behavior may not be unusual in big football towns on victory Saturdays (Columbus, Ohio, was subjected to more extensive and severe rioting by students celebrating a Rose Bowl invitation), Kent is unaccustomed to both phenomena...
...There is a terrible irony when the local grand jury in its ignorance says, correctly I think, that the same conditions which produced May 4 still exist on the campus...
...Students at Kent are relatively clean-cut and well-scrubbed...
...It is recommended that this student's name be deleted from routine mailing lists...
...At this moment, litigation is pending on what seems to have been illegal search and seizure by local authority...
...Businesses were closed, liquor sales banned, and curfews imposed...
...The memorandum was circulated by the Registrar's office: This is to inform you information has been re ceived that Allison Beth Krause, Student Num ber 220 58 6598 9, died May 4, 1970...
...It has most of the strengths and weaknesses of such institutions...
...Indeed they do...
...University spokesmen explained that it would be necessary to "eliminate" the radicals from the campus and clarified that academic freedom did not include the right to radicalize or propagandize students...
...Throughout the weekend, a spirit of more or less good fun prevailed, characterized by some cops-and-robbers chases involving students dashing into ground cover while pursued by hovering helicopters, and exemplified by Allison Krause placing a flower in a soldier's gun barrel...
...They make the same errors as that of our grand jurors, who also see Kent State in terms of differing life-styles, value systems, and commitments to flag and country...
...Despite interruption of routine and destruction of property, there is no great alarm...
...The future...
...In explaining the decision, the president's executive assistant expressed fear of "bad publicity...
...Students are not now, as they were not earlier, all that interested in destroying the town or in closing the university...
...Both David Sanford in The New Republic and I. F. Stone in his biweekly have done good work in describing the situation at Kent, and high marks should go as well to the Akron Beacon-Journal (a Republican newspaper) for its honest and tough reporting...
...Kent State represents neither the laxity or liberal promiscuity charged by the Right nor "the closed society in microcosm" charged by the New Left...
...The university is trying to raise itself by its intellectual bootstraps...
...Sunday's calm was disturbed only by the flamboyant presence of Governor Rhodes...
...Some, however, look and act differently...
...I cannot speak with enough praise," said the mayor, "when I speak of the protection of the City of Kent offered by the Ohio National Guard while they were on our streets...
...That injudicious order has since been cut down by a federal district court judge in Cleveland...
...Faculty and administration remain caught, despite their decent instincts, in the dilemmas of big institutions, isolated both from each other and from public opinion...
...Their apathy may bring, ironically, an interval of peace...
...For the university's response has been essen NOTEBOOK tially twofold: it has inflated its rhetoric about reconciliation even while the realities of genuine community and communication are absent, and it has increased its security forces...
...As several attempts were necessary to set the old wooden ROTC shack on fire, it seems fair to conclude that the burning was not the work of trained indigenous revolutionaries nor of the rumored presence of carloads of SDS weathermen...
...May 4 has not changed this...
...Later, this was branded a riot by the grand jury, though the damage was not, by comparative standards, extensive nor was there any looting...
...It rather is a symbol for institutions and systems that have gotten out of human and humane control...
...Similar misunderstanding is manifest in the grand jury report, especially in its social obiter dicta on life-styles and values...
...Neither students nor faculty are radical...
...they were the work of incompetent men with little experience in understanding student unrest...
...The Guardsmen were fatigued after difficult duty in a wildcat Teamsters strike in northeastern Ohio, where they had been subjected to insults and rocks...
...This pathology may be understood in terms of institutions and processes out of scale and out of control...
...The example of the Columbus football riot is again instructive...
...Both Sanford and Stone, however, have interpreted the events at Kent as having a more explicitly "political" character than I, as a local observer, judge to be warranted...
...Large numbers of faculty are native Ohioans, many of them having attended Kent State...
...Most evidence from specialized studies makes clear that political issues count for little among large numbers of Americans, including young people...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
