Ineffective Leadership
Aside from the absence of war, Calkins says the current administration is less conservative than in 1970. He finds the leadership partly responsible for the breakdown on May 4.
"The conservative establishment is not nearly as fearful as they were then," Calkins says. "At that time, the administration thought of the university as being under siege for months. They had a 'war room.' There had been other demonstrations earlier, and thousands of students had been involved. There was a sort of tension that just doesn't exist now."
Geology professor Glenn Frank, a faculty marshal at the May 4 rally, warns students and onlookers not to put themselves in danger. (Kent State Archives)
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Calkins recalls some of the extremes that the administration went to just to gain control of student activists. In 1969, there was be an on-campus trial disciplining certain members of Students for a Democratic Society. When demonstrators arrived outside the administration building where the trial was to be held, the hearings were moved to the Music and Speech building. The demonstrators followed but were met by police.
"The police came and trapped them in there," Calkins says. "It was probably a plan. This all suggests the kind of atmosphere that existed. The administration was plotting with the police to trap these demonstrators in Music and Speech."
Calkins was in Music and Speech at the time and helped several elevator loads of students escape before the police discovered them.
The inability to understand student activists in 1970 permeated even the highest level of the university's administration. Lewis says that the university president at the time, Robert I. White, provided ineffectual and inadequate leadership in the campus's time of need.
"I think Robert White did a terrible job as president," Lewis says. "He just was incapable of working with informal structures. So, he would work through elected faculty and elected students, but he seemed incapable of understanding emerging groups."
  
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