Troops fired on Kent State students in 1970. Survivors see echoes in today’s campus protest movement
KENT, Ohio — Dean Kahler threw himself to the ground and covered his head as the bullets started flying. The Ohio National Guard had opened fire on unarmed war protesters at Kent State University, including Kahler, a freshman.
M1 rifle bullets hit the ground all around him. “And then I was hit,” Kahler recalled more than fifty years later. “It felt like a bee sting.” But it was even worse: a bullet had passed through his lung, shattered three vertebrae and damaged his spinal cord. He was paralyzed.
Four Kent State students were killed and Kahler and eight others were injured when National Guard members fired into a crowd on May 4, 1970, after a tense altercation in which troops used tear gas to break up an anti-war demonstration and demonstrators pelted rocks threw at them. the guards. It was a turning point in American history — a violent bookend to the turbulent 1960s — that sparked nationwide campus protests and forced the temporary closure of hundreds of colleges and universities.
Now the Kent State shootings and their aftermath have taken on new relevance, with students demonstrating against another distant war, university administrators trying to balance the right to free speech against their need to maintain order, and a divided audience that sees disturbing images of chaotic confrontations.
Kent State plans a solemn commemoration Saturday, as it does every May 4, with a gathering at noon on the commons, near where troops killed students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder in a 13-second burst of gunfire and rifle. pistol fire.
Kahler, meanwhile, watches intently as this new generation of students demands an end to military action, and wonders if universities are making the same mistakes.
“I wonder if university administrators and college administrators have learned lessons from the 1970s,” Kahler said in an interview at his home outside Canton, Ohio. “I think they’re a little heavy-handed, a little over the top.”
More than 2,300 people have been arrested at dozens of American colleges and universities in recent weeks as police broke up demonstrations against the war between Israel and Hamas, according to Associated Press figures. Police in riot gear have dismantled tent camps, driven protesters from occupied buildings and made arrests, mostly for refusing orders to disperse, although some have been charged with vandalism, resisting arrest or other offenses.
Things have been much quieter at Kent State, a large public school in northeastern Ohio, where officials say they have long sought to promote civil dialogue.
“Largely driven by our history, we are always and consistently working on a number of things. One of them is that we embrace freedom of expression,” said Todd Diacon, president of the university. “And another thing is that we understand what happens when conversations and attitudes become so polarized that someone who disagrees with you is demonized — that that can happen.” lead to violence.”
Kent State has engaged in debates about the war in Gaza and invited students from opposing sides to share their perspectives, said Neil Cooper, director of Kent State’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies.
“There can be a temptation to try and not talk about these issues because they’re too difficult and too challenging, and you know, there’s a concern that talking about them is just going to make them worse,” Cooper said. “Our approach has been very different.”
The demonstrations at Kent State have been peaceful, but there is still an undercurrent of tension and there are both Jewish and Palestinian students who do not feel safe, said Adriana Gasiewski, a junior who has reported on them for the school newspaper.
Gasiewski worries about the powder keg atmosphere at schools like Columbia University, where the current wave of protests emerged last month and New York City police repeatedly clashed with demonstrators. Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson has called for the National Guard to be deployed to Columbia, though New York officials have said police could handle the protests. President Joe Biden said Thursday he does not want troops deployed on campuses.
“My biggest fear is … that they bring the National Guard to Columbia and it looks like history repeats itself on May 4,” Gasiewski said.
Historian Ralph Young of Temple University sees clear echoes of the protest movement against the Vietnam War.
“I think they are comparable in scope and impact,” said Young, whose books include “American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent.” As in the 1960s and 1970s, he said, today’s crackdowns are “just making more and more people angry and I think it will only increase the protests and spread them further to other campuses.”
The parallels don’t end there.
New York Mayor Eric Adams has said “outside agitators” are fueling anti-Semitic protests. In 1970, Ohio Governor James Rhodes, who made the decision to send National Guard troops to Kent State, accused outside groups of spreading terror, calling them “the worst kind of people we have in America.”
Students were then outraged that President Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia instead of concluding the war as he had promised. Days before the shooting, protesters in downtown Kent had violently clashed with police and the university’s ROTC building was set on fire.
Then, on May 4, Chic Canfora joined several hundred fellow students on the commons, protesting not only the war but also the presence of troops on campus.
Canfora escaped injury. Her brother, Alan Canfora, was shot and wounded. Now a journalism professor at Kent State, she worries that campus administrators elsewhere are using the “militant actions of a few” to portray all protesters “as violent and worthy of the kind of heat they want to send into these situations.”
“I think all college campuses need to come together and figure out how students can be what students have historically been: the conscience of America,” Canfora said.
Gregory Payne, a scholar at Emerson College and an expert on the Kent State shootings, said Vietnam-era protesters were certainly concerned about their call for convocation, but they also took a moral stand, as did current protesters who see the US as complicit in the disproportionate death toll of Palestinians resulting from Israel’s response to the October 6 Hamas attack.
“They’re protesting, you know, against a war that’s horrible for all parties involved. And I think they’re trying to draw attention to it. People may question some strategies and tactics. But I think there will be a legacy and there will also be a defining characteristic of this era,” Payne said. “My hope is that there is no death and bloodshed like we saw at Kent State.”
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Rubinkam reported from northeastern Pennsylvania.