On May 4, 1970, The Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd on the campus of Kent State University, Killing four students and wounding nine others. In thirteen seconds of gunfire, Kent State became an international symbol of antiwar protest and government repression. As the wounded and dead lay upon the ground, the strike movement initiated to protest the American military invasion of Cambodia immediately increased. Students at 1,350 universities and colleges participated in demonstrations against the shootings and the escalation. In the aftermath of this unprecedented upheaval, which compelled President Richard M. Nixon to reconsider futur escalations, Kent State administrators and faculty, as well as the national news media, made great efforts to convince the public that the university had always been a quiet place, untouched by students radicalism and antiwar protest. The shootings, the insisted, were an aberration in tranquil Kent, Ohio. The image they sought to project, however, was inaccurate.
In Ohio there was sustained resistance to funding higher education and an ingrained suspicion of liberalism. In the early 1960s, while other Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin led the nation in appropriations for construction in institutions of higher education, Ohio lagged far behind. Dominated by conservative, rural interests, the Ohio legislature viewed universities as unnecessary expenses, as well as potential breeding grounds for communist subversion. .
However, the forces of change started to overcome this cultural mind set. Kent Stat's expanding student enrollment from five thousand in 1954 to over twenty-one thousand by 1966, and the construction of more dormitories signalled Kent's transformation from a commuter and teacher's college to a residential and academically comprehensive institution. The only public university in the area until the mid 1960s, Kent's student body was mostly dominated by the sons and daughters of Akron, Cleveland, and Youngstown blue-collar workers and business people.