When the bullets began flying, Dean Kahler threw himself to the ground and covered his head. The Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed war demonstrators at Kent State University, one of whom was Kahler, a freshman.
All around him, M1 rifle shots landed on the ground. Kahler recalled the impact more than 50 years later. “It felt like a bee sting.” But it was worse than that: a bullet had penetrated his lung, destroyed three vertebrae, and damaged his spinal cord. He became paralyzed.
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On May 4, 1970, National Guard personnel opened fire on a crowd, murdering four Kent State students and injuring Kahler and eight others, after troops deployed tear gas to disperse an anti-war gathering and protestors threw rocks at the guardsmen. It was a pivotal moment in American history—a violent bookend to the volatile 1960s—that sparked campus protests across the country and prompted the temporary closure of hundreds of colleges and universities.
The Kent State shootings and their aftermath have gained new relevance, with students protesting against another distant war, college administrators balancing free speech rights against the need to maintain order, and a divided public seeing disturbing images of chaotic confrontations.
Kent State is preparing a mournful commemoration Saturday, as it does every May 4, with a noon gathering on the commons, near where troops killed students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder in a 13-second burst of rifle and pistol fire.
Meanwhile, Kahler is closely monitoring this new generation of college students who urge an end to military action, and he wonders if universities are repeating the same mistakes.
“I question whether college administrators and trustees of colleges have learned any lessons from the ’70s,” Kahler said in an interview from his home outside Canton, Ohio. “I think they’re a little heavy-handed, a little over the top.”
An Associated Press count indicates that police have arrested over 2,300 individuals at dozens of colleges and universities in recent weeks for disrupting anti-Israeli-Hamas protests. In riot gear, police have destroyed tent encampments, evicted protestors from occupied buildings, and arrested them, typically for their refusal to disperse, although some have faced charges of vandalism, resisting arrest, and other offenses.
Things have been much quieter at Kent State, a huge public university in northeastern Ohio, where authorities said they have long worked to promote respectful dialogue.
“Our history largely influences a few things we’re always and continuously about.” “We value free expression,” stated Todd Diacon, the university’s president. Furthermore, we comprehend the consequences of polarized conversations and attitudes that demonize those who disagree with you, potentially leading to violence.
According to Neil Cooper, director of Kent State’s School of Peace and Conflict Studies, the university has engaged in debates regarding the Gaza war by asking students from opposing sides to share their opinions.
“There can be a temptation to try and not to talk about these issues because they’re too difficult and too challenging, and, you know, there’s a concern that talking about them will make them worse,” said Cooper. “Our approach has been very different.”
The demonstrations at Kent State have been nonviolent, but there is still an undercurrent of animosity, and both Jewish and Palestinian students feel unsafe, according to Adriana Gasiewski, a junior who has covered them for the school newspaper.
Gasiewski is concerned about the volatile atmosphere at institutions such as Columbia University, where the current wave of protests began last month, and New York City police have clashed with demonstrators on many occasions. Despite New York officials’ assurances that police can manage the protests, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has called for the deployment of the National Guard to Columbia. On Thursday, President Joe Biden expressed his opposition to the deployment of troops to universities.
“My biggest fear is that they bring the National Guard to Columbia, and that it’s like history repeating itself on May 4,” Gasiewski told the crowd.
Temple University historian Ralph Young sees similarities to the Vietnam War protest movement.
“I think they do compare in scale and impact,” said Young, who wrote “American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent.” He said that the current crackdowns, like in the 1960s and ’70s, “only get more and more people angry, and I think it’ll just magnify the protests and spread them further into other campuses.”
The parallels do not stop there.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has claimed that “outside agitators” are inciting anti-Semitic protests. In 1970, Ohio Gov. James Rhodes, who decided to send National Guard troops to Kent State, accused outside groups of promoting terror, calling them “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
Students were outraged that President Richard Nixon was bombing Cambodia instead of ending the war as he had pledged. Demonstrators violently clashed with police in downtown Kent days before the deaths, setting the university’s ROTC building on fire.
Then, on May 4, Chic Canfora joined several hundred other students at the Commons to protest not only the war but also the presence of troops on campus.
Canfora escaped harm. Her brother, Alan Canfora, sustained gunshot wounds. She is now a journalism teacher at Kent State, and she is concerned that college officials elsewhere are using the “militant actions of a few” to depict all protestors “as violent and worthy of the kind of heat that they want to send in to these situations.”
“I think that all university campuses should get together and figure out how to allow students to be what students have historically been, the conscience of America,” Canfora said in an interview.
Gregory Payne, an Emerson College scholar and expert on the Kent State shootings, said Vietnam-era protesters were concerned about being drafted, but they also took a moral stand, as do today’s demonstrators who see the United States as complicit in the disproportionate death toll of Palestinians as a result of Israel’s response to the Oct. 6 Hamas attack.
“They’re protesting a conflict that is awful on all sides. I believe they’re trying to draw attention to it. Some strategies and techniques might be subject to critique. “But I believe there will be a legacy and defining attribute of this era,” Payne remarked. “My hope is that there is not death and bloodshed like we saw in Kent State.”
