Kent State Revisited: An Interview with Dr. Richard Bredemeier

Compiled by Erika Nestor

On May 4, 1970, four students were tragically killed during a student protest of the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. This event was a defining moment not only in higher education, but in the history of the United States. Dr. Richard Bredemeier was just beginning his career in student affairs at Kent State when this tragedy occurred. He remained at Kent State for 26 years and recently retired as Vice President for Enrollment and Student Life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Deborah Hunter and her class, The (Un)Changing Academy, in the fall of 1994. In this interview, Dr. Bredemeier offers a unique, first-hand perspective on the tragedy at Kent State, how it affected students, and how today's student affairs professionals can learn from this event which occurred over twenty-five years ago.

Dr. Hunter: We're eager to learn from your experiences and your reflections on what happened on your campus almost three decades ago. We're so pleased that you're willing to give us some perspective. Tell us how you've made sense over the years of what you experienced at Kent State and any impact it's left on your campus.

Dr. Bredemeier: Let me start off just talking a little about the impact on the campus. One of the things that struck me was the way the campus responded to an event as traumatic as that event was, how it gelled the campus together and all constituencies really pulled together. We formed a community the like of which I've never seen at a university before or since. Faculty were willing to teach classes in all kinds of ways-in their houses, in their garages and so forth. A sense of loyalty to the institution came out of that. Now, I hate to add that over the period of years, that kind of feeling has eroded away, partially I think because people who were involved with it moved on to other jobs, retired, what have you. So legacies don't necessarily last is one of the things that I've learned from this.

We did have some lasting impacts. For example, one academic program that is designed to teach students skills in mediation and nonviolent change is still in existence. One of the things I would hope we've learned from that event was that we have to be able to deal with strongly held opinions that differ from our own in ways other than violence.

I think one of the reasons that we were able to deal with some strong feelings on both sides of the fence with regard to the Gulf War had to do with the fact that enough people were still here who had the feeling that we can't let those kinds of differences cause people to react violently with each other. We had to find ways to get people to communicate about issues in civil ways. I think one of the great issues that's facing our society today, and universities are certainly not exempt from this, is the importance of civil discourse and of civility in creating community on the campus.

Question: Would you tell us where you were in your career in May of 1970? Were you starting off?

Answer: Yes, I had completed my Ph.D. a year previous to that and worked in the Dean of Men's Office at Purdue University. At that point Purdue had a Dean of Men and a Dean of Women. I was working at the Dean of Men's Office while I completed my dissertation, and then shortly after finishing my dissertation and getting my degree I took the position here at Kent as Director of Student Activities. It was really my second full-time position, the first one being an assistant to the Dean of Men at Purdue. Obviously the position at Kent was very early on in my career and I've been here for 26 years.

Question: Would you take us back to those days in May of 1970, what you remember, what things you make sense of now looking back and how things unfolded?

Answer: I felt a lot of things as I look back at it. One thing is that we have never been able to establish exactly what happened at Kent. A lot of us, a lot of writers certainly included in this group, have our own opinion, but the legal system has never been able to establish the facts of what occurred--this person was at fault or this person was in violation of law, or whatever, but there has never been a court case that has answered the question "did someone violate a law?" Yet four people were killed and nine were wounded with gunfire. But the question "was that justified or unjustified?" was never answered legally. There has never been a legal settlement of that issue. The state did settle a lawsuit out of court with the wounded students and the parents of the students who were killed, but it was an out of court settlement which, therefore, still leaves the question of guilt or innocence undecided.

Another observation: That was a very troubled time in higher education. We spent a lot of time as an administrative staff planning for the situations that were occurring on campuses: demonstrations, some violent, destruction of property, etc.--and we had, in my mind, an excellent plan. We expected that if we couldn't handle the problem, the first outside agency we would go to would be the State Highway Patrol. As it happened, in May of 1970, the State Highway Patrol was over-extended because of a very violent truckers' strike occurring here in Ohio and the fallback security force was the National Guard with whom we had almost no communication prior to their arrival on campus. As a result, many of the situations that occurred here really lacked any advanced planning. A lot of planning had been done with the Highway Patrol, but that planning didn't transfer to the National Guard.

The National Guard had a very different protocol, a very different approach. The Highway Patrol would have been coming in as a way of supplementing or supporting the university's police. The National Guard came in and said "We're in control, you stand back and do what we tell you to do." Therefore, the lines of communication, the how-do-we-deal-with-this, were completely broken down. In fact, even after the shooting, had some members of the Highway Patrol not arrived on the campus, I'm not so sure we wouldn't have had more people dead simply because the leadership of the National Guard was intent on moving the crowd again and showed no interest in talking with university administrators.

I think in the eyes of the guard we [the administration] were part of the problem, and it was only (and I witnessed this personally) the interceding of the chief of the Highway Patrol saying "Give 'em a chance to move the students peacefully," that we were able to get the students to leave peacefully. If there had been another attempt at moving them with bayonets I don't know how the students would have reacted, given the emotion at that time. We talk about communication all the time. Communication. Communication. Communication. And it was clearly a major problem at that time.

Something else that I learned from the May 4th tragedy was that we didn't have very good . . . let me back off . . .we had very poor communication with the students who were actively protesting the war. I think we had very good communication with the typical student governing structure. The President of the student body was in the room with the President. However, the student body President had no more connection or communications with the activist students than we administrators did. The same thing would have been true in talking about residence hall government. The activist students that were involved in the protests were not in the normal student organizational structures and so we had very little communication with them.

When I first looked at pictures of the protests, I was convinced we had been infiltrated heavily by non-students. I don't think that was true at all. I think that there were a few non-students. Mary Vecchio, whose picture was on the cover of Time, is the most obvious example of that, but the number of non-students involved in Kent State in May of '70 were very, very small. Now, there may have been some outsiders in leadership capacities, but the mass numbers were basically students, disgruntled students, who were very unhappy with the system. When I say "the system," I'm saying the whole system--everything from university government and university administration to state government, county government, federal government, etc. After all, they were very adamantly opposing the Vietnam War.

Question: Can you tell us a little more about how the university came to lose control of the campus or how that was taken away from them by the National Guard?

Answer: Yes, well it's a very interesting thing, and it turns out in hindsight, the authority to remove the control of the campus from the President was never given, but let me take you through it.

On Saturday night, I believe, when the ROTC building was burned and the National Guard was called in by the mayor of the city of Kent, the governor came to the city and made a speech saying that he was issuing an executive order declaring a state of emergency in Kent and at Kent State University and the National Guard was in charge. We took the Governor at his word and, therefore, took orders from the National Guard. As it turned out, that executive order creating a state of emergency was never issued, but, based on a public statement, a statement that was clearly documented in the media, the governor made a very emphatic statement about having established a state of emergency and, therefore, the National Guard was in charge. That, as I said, did not in fact happen, but we took the governor at his word.

It was under that assumption of an executive order that would have given the National Guard the authority to disband an assembly of people. I can remember being at one meeting when the question came up of how many people constitute an assembly. If two people were walking down the sidewalk, did that form an illegal gathering? We asked a member of the National Guard, who was the liaison to the university administration, that question. He said he didn't know and he'd go find out. He went back to the National Guard headquarters and came back and the answer was three. I can still recall a faculty member who was functioning as a Faculty Marshall asking "well, if there are two people talking and I walk up to them to tell them anything, does that make it an illegal gathering?" I supposed it did.

Question: What was that like for you and your colleagues to feel that you were not in charge of the campus?

Answer: Remember, at the time I was Director of Student Activities, which was about three layers down from the President. I suspect the feeling that you're talking about was much more strongly felt by the President and Vice-Presidents, who felt that the control of their campus had been wrested from their hands. I was at a much more operational level and was viewing the problem from a greater distance.

It was obvious that there were likely to be major problems when the decision makers had no concept of the issues as well as no understanding of the population they were dealing with. There wasn't dialogue or discussion about the issues, or the kind of normal decision making process that universities are used to. University decision making processes and military processes are so different that they're just totally incompatible. So you've got a system that's used to a way of making decisions, a way of coming to conclusions, that's just so vastly different than the military, at least the military as it was implementing it's processes in May of '70 at Kent, Ohio. It was pretty obvious to me that those kinds of things were going to lead to problems. Now, I say that in a way of reflecting back on the situation, where, at the time, it was like fighting a forest fire and you weren't spending much time thinking about the principles of fire protection.

Question: Could you tell us how the protest and the killings affected you and your staff. What were those days afterward like?

Answer: I am not sure whether you are asking about feelings during the protest or after the killing. Let me deal with after the killings, because it's a very different situation. Remember shortly after the killing, which occurred just after noon, that by that evening there was almost no one on the campus except National Guard. We had absolutely evacuated the campus, moved students out of the residence halls. There were probably 7,000 students living in residence halls and, by that evening, there were less than 1,000, and by the middle of the next morning there was no one on campus.

There were no staff on the campus by noon the next day. I was issued one of probably 50 or 75 plastic identification cards that allowed me back on campus. Within the student affairs division, with over 100 staff, there were probably only ten or twelve of us that had cards. For example, deans of colleges weren't permitted back on the campus. People who were taking care of animal labs were allowed to return, people from the heating plant also, but I don't think there was a single faculty person, for instance, permitted on the campus for several days. No student was permitted on the campus, so the interaction at that point was minimal. Staff also left the campus and, for instance, resident staff, that didn't live in this area, would've gone home. Most students were home within 24 hours of the shootings.

The reactions from staff, I think, were mostly personal emotions. I can recall receiving a call from a student who was a very accomplished cartoonist, in fact he won a Pulitzer Prize for drawing a cartoon related to this event. It was a picture of justice, a blind justice, and I don't remember all the details but he did win the Pulitzer so it was obviously well done. He called me to find out if I was permitted on campus and, if I was, could I get his art supplies. He had kept them in a toolbox in a student organization office in the same building where my office was located. At the time he was a cartoonist for our student newspaper, and, in fact, I knew exactly where his box was. In fact, my bringing his art supplies to him allowed him to draw the cartoon that won him the Pulitzer. I said I'd pick it up and told him he could stop by my house that evening. About midnight, he went home, after arriving at my house at about six o'clock.

Obviously he wanted to talk about a lot more than simply how I found the art supplies. That was a very common kind of interaction with students who were trying to understand what had happened and why it happened. He had tried to explain to his parents what was going on and experienced a very, very strong reaction from his parents about why he was out there at the protest, was he participating in any of this, why didn't he mind his own business, why didn't he stop those students who were doing those nasty things, trying to overthrow our government?

We formed teams of faculty and administrators who visited with groups of students around the state. These meetings generally took place at other state universities. Invitations were sent to students who lived in a particular area inviting them to an open forum. The purpose was to communicate with students and let them talk about what they were feeling. The room would immediately fill with emotions. People needed the time to just emote about what had happened and react to it, talk with one another. I'm convinced that most of the good that we accomplished in doing that was setting up the meeting so the conversations occurred among students. Yes, it occurred with the team also, but simply providing the opportunity for people to come together and talk about it was a very important thing, probably as much as any one thing that made the difference between why Kent State University could re-open and is thriving today.

Staff had that same kind of need and were constantly looking for ways to facilitate discussion, but it was very, very difficult because the campus was closed; therefore, the places that you'd normally meet were not available for these kinds of things. This situation continued for six to eight weeks--not that long, maybe about four weeks. The next event held on the campus after the shooting in May was June graduation.

Question: Can you talk a little bit about what the feeling was like when the campus reopened. Also, what were some of the programs or structures the administration had in place for when the students returned?

Answer: The first event that was held was graduation, and the only people permitted on campus were those graduating students and their guests. Each person had received a special invitation and security was very, very high. In other words, probably one policeman per square foot. It was so critically important that we hold that graduation, as a symbol that the institution successfully completed that academic year. And as I said, the faculty taught classes by correspondence and in off campus locations. Any student that was at the level of graduation was permitted to complete all courses required for graduation during spring quarter. I'm sure some students dropped courses that weren't at that level, but the faculty put forth a tremendous effort in providing students with the opportunity to complete the requirements of their courses for that term. Graduation was the first event after May 4, 1970.

Following that, the next event was the opening of summer school. Several committees met during the summer, looking at this issue and trying to determine what needed to be done in response to this event. The Center for Peaceful Change, which is now an academic unit granting credit, was formed as an outgrowth of the recommendations from that committee. Graduates of this program have skills in mediating disputes nonviolently.

As residence halls opened, staff needed to be trained in new skills. The counseling center staff were very critical and worked double and triple time training staff to be able to deal with the emotional problems of students when they came back. Students, as you all know, are probably more resilient to these things than we administrators. And I will tell you, they coped with it amazingly well, particularly after a few weeks went by. But those early things that we did, that I mentioned earlier, were probably very critical in providing a forum or opportunity for them to deal with those issues.

Question: It's hard to imagine a similar occurrence today, but I don't want to be naive in thinking that it's not possible. I'm wondering what we can do as professionals to be both proactive to prevent these incidents from getting as out of hand as Kent State and also how we could react to a situation like this one.

Answer: I suspect thinking about how we might prevent that kind of thing from happening again is not the best way to use our time because I think, in many ways, it was a very unusual set of circumstances that allowed what happened at Kent to occur. For example, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that had the Highway Patrol been called in to be a controlling agent, the results would have been drastically different. If Kent State had been located in any other state in the Union, this would not have happened, because only in Ohio was the National Guard permitted to carry loaded weapons. If I could have made one decision that would have changed things it would simply have been to say the National Guard may not carry loaded weapons. That would have changed all of this completely.

When I came to Ohio from Indiana I had been a commander of a reserve unit in Lafayette, Indiana. One of the responsibilities that unit had was being prepared to handle civil disobedience. That was about the time that Studebaker [the car company] left South Bend. South Bend was identified as an area where civil disobedience could likely occur. The unit I commanded had gone through a lot of training to be prepared to deal with civil disobedience. It was absolutely forbidden to have the normal troops carrying loaded weapons.

In the U.S. Army Resource Units there was an anti-sniper squad that was permitted to carry loaded weapons. This unit, under very tight control of an officer, was designed to deal with a sniper attacking a unit that was trying to control civil disobedience with essentially fixed bayonets. If the unit came under fire the anti-sniper squad dealt with the sniper. That was the normal procedure in all states except Ohio. Had the normal procedure applied in Ohio, there is no way that any officer would have commanded the troops to load weapons and fire under the circumstances of what was happening on May 4th of 1970 on the Kent State University campus.

I am convinced that what happened at Kent State absolutely would not have happened in a command structure. So you need to understand that I believe the chances of this event reoccurring as it did on May 4, 1970 is almost impossible. Having said that, I think the situations we need to think about--the ones that are more likely to occur--are the situations that are occurring in our society today, such as physical violence, the use of weapons, people having very little tolerance for anyone who disagrees with them or is in any way different from them.

If we are looking for a similarity perhaps it is that the students who were protesting in May of '70 believed we shouldn't be fighting in Vietnam and we should change our policy and the establishment was about to accept that position. Perhaps a more likely occurrence today is where two people or two groups of people believe one thing, somebody else believes another, and violence is likely to occur. In our society today we seem to be able to move very quickly from "I don't like you" to "I'm going to shoot you" or "I do shoot you." I would clearly say that I don't think this is beyond the realm of probability, in fact it is fairly likely for American universities to have four people shot on campus this year. I think the probabilities are much more likely that they'd be shot by peers, by people who disagree for one reason or another. We're seeing this happening in the cities right across the street from our campuses today. It's not unlikely that it could be on the campus tomorrow. This to me is a much more likely scenario for that kind of violence to break out today and that's probably where we need to be focusing our attention. That's another four-hour discussion about how we create community and how we create civility on our campuses when it's not occurring in our society.

Putting a plug in for the NASPA [National Association of Student Personnel Administrators] conference occurring next week, the theme of the conference is looking at the nature of students who are coming to our campuses. How many of our students have been or are members of gangs? Will we have gangs on the campus? Some of us do already. I think this is the kind of horrible violence that is more likely to occur today, much more likely than a governmental police force breaking up an act of civil disobedience. Also, I suspect that the technology to deal with civil disobedience is much better today than maybe what happened at Kent on May 4th. Know on wood.

Question: When people think of Kent State of Jackson State they think of people that were killed but there were nine people who were wounded at Kent State. Do you know where they are today and how they are?

Answer: Yes, I would guess the nine students that were wounded probably represent a fairly accurate sample of any other nine students that were enrolled that year. They're all over the place, bring all kinds of different things. One's a college professor, one's a lawyer, one is a politician. I don't know that I can tick them all off at this point in time but each year on May 4th, we have a commemoration ceremony and usually four, five, or six attend. I think all nine were back at the twentieth anniversary and I would expect all nine to be back this year. Some of them really are not very politically active, others are in different ways.

Let me just give you my opinion of the four students who were killed. Two were killed because of their beliefs and they were active participants in the civil disobedience. One was killed because he was part of the crowd watching what was going on, and one was killed because she unfortunately chose the wrong way to walk back to her car after class. I would expect that if you translated that to the nine wounded students you would find the same thing, that some were actively involved in protest, others were bystanders walking by or whatever and as a result they were wounded. I believe this explains the different levels of their participation in the ceremony. The one student who was most seriously wounded and is now in a wheelchair has been a very active member in his community, and a county commissioner. He is a very positive young man working within the system at this point.

Question: Students who are coming to campus from gangs or from various backgrounds may feel alienated. You've mentioned that there was not a lot of communication with those students who may have been leaders within the protest. What are some ways to make contact with those students who we don't see in student government meetings or in residence hall councils and such?

Answer: One of the things we need to think about is the nature of our students and the ways that we can reach out to make contact with them. I think this is one of the strong arguments for a very diverse staff, not only racially, but culturally, gender, etc. People who can help us understand our students.

I'll tell you, if I saw on the resume of a potential candidate that they had been a gang member, that would be a real plus in my mind for adding that person to my staff. I was born and raised in rural southern Indiana, went to Purdue University, and have been an administrator at Kent State University and have lived in a suburban community in northeastern Ohio. What would I know about gang members? Nothing. And the important thing for me to do is recognize that, and recognize that I don't know how to communicate with them and recognize that, not only do I need to learn about gangs, but more importantly, much more importantly, is that I need to have staff who either have that skill or who, along with me, can be trained to understand and be able to communicate with folks who aren't the same as I am. Our campuses are going to become far more diverse. That will bring all kinds of tremendous opportunities. By the same token, all kinds of challenges to enable those diverse communities to communicate with one another.

I don't know about your campus, but I know on our campus, we have a real debate going on between our Jewish community and our African-American community. Both communities have suffered a lot of discrimination in the past and yet are having some very uncivil discourse with one another. WE have to be able to find ways to get them to sit down and understand each other and talk meaningfully to each other. That's just as important for our students education as anything they'll learn in the classroom and is not anti-academic by any means, but they're going to go out of our universities and live in very diverse communities, and work in very diverse workplaces. They are going to have to be able to understand and work with people who are very different than they are. That's very different than what it was like for graduates in 1960 and '65 when I graduated.

Dr. Hunter: Thank you very much for taking the time to share your piece of history.

Dr. Bredemeier: You're welcome.

Erika Nestor graduated from Indiana University in 1988, where she majored in Business and minored in Art History. Before coming to the University of Vermont, she worked in Admissions, Career Planning and Placement, and in a College President's Office. Erika is currently a first year HESA student.