Kent State Revisited

In the Portage County, Ohio, courthouse last week, the trials began for the first of the Kent 25--students, outsiders and one professor indicted a year ago for rioting, arson and other crimes supposedly committed just before the campus shootings of May 4, 1970. On that day, four students were killed and ten wounded by National Guard gunfire. The same grand jury that handed down the indictments exonerated the National Guardsmen of any blame for the deaths. Last week a trial jury of eight men and four women visited the campus to examine the site of the slayings. TIME Correspondent William Friedman also looked in on the haunted campus to measure its mood a year and a half after the killings. His report:

On a crisp November afternoon, Kent State University resembles any other thriving Midwestern campus. Hirsute young men and their long-haired girl friends, identically dressed in blue jeans and peacoats, stroll hand in hand across a snow-covered reach of lawn. Their path is interrupted by bulldozed mud trails, wire fences and spools of cable, the debris of new campus construction.

But Kent State today is nothing like Oberlin--or even Kent State, 1969. The bloody afternoon of May 4 ensured that the campus would not be the same for years to come. Passers-by stop at the sculpture outside Taylor Hall, insert a little finger in a clean bullet hole and quietly move on. In general there is a sense of listlessness on the campus, coupled with a lingering frustration over the handling of what the students consider to have been a massacre. Last August the office of Attorney General John Mitchell dropped further federal investigation of the incident. Two nonradical students got up a petition calling on President Nixon to reverse Mitchell's decision. They gathered more than 10,000 signatures in just eleven days and carried the petition to Presidential Aide Leonard Garment in Washington; they have little hope of success.

Drastic Cuts. Kent's new president, Glenn A. Olds, 50, accompanied the students to Washington. He was named to replace Dr. Robert I. White, who retired after the tragedy and is presently touring Kent State exchange programs abroad. Olds is past dean of international studies and world affairs for the State

University of New York, and most recently the U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. His Government connections have led some students to brand him as "Nixon's p.r. man on campus."

Olds acknowledges his difficulties. He is aware that most of his students are disillusioned with the System, and that he cannot proceed with the business of education until the question of May 4 is adequately resolved. On top of that, he must contend with a hostile state legislature, which has proposed drastic cuts in the state education budget.

No Outrage. Unquestionably, the school has calmed down; the campus police force has been beefed up from 30 men to 88, and most of the hard-core radicals have left school anyway. There have been no political rallies this year. Kent's radicals came to the movement late in the game, and like Dostoevsky's young radicals in The Possessed, they were shocked by their first encounter with political reality. Says Dr. Edward Crosby, director of the Institute for African American Affairs: "The students had all been playing roles. They never expected violence."

Students have sporadically contributed to a Kent 25 defense fund, but most of the campus has turned toward passivity. One student concedes: "Kent State is now a household word. But Kent State as a symbol is more important to other universities than it is to itself." Adds Bill Arthrell, one of the 25 indicted: "You can't maintain your outrage for a year. Now everyone has his own trip: dope, work or the counterculture." Jerry Lewis, a sociology professor, perhaps best characterizes the prevailing mood: "As much as we want justice, we're all tired. Many of us are just trying to go to school."

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