By Michelle Cioci
Students get two hours off from classes. People from all over the country travel to the Kent State campus. One main memorial has already been built on the hill by Taylor Hall. Other memorials, including the new Prentice Hall parking lot spaces, are spread nearby. It has been almost 30 years. How much is enough?
"We cannot grieve forever," says Andrea Szkatulski, a fourth-year international relations major. "Why are we concentrating on the past?"
While some continue to struggle with and honor May 4, 1970, many students just want to move on and erase the images of the past.
"People back home always ask me, 'Don't you go to the school where those students were shot?'" says Szkatulski, who is from Buffalo, N.Y. "We are not known for our educational programs or our sports teams. Instead, we are known for murders that happened almost 30 years ago. It's time for that to change."
Many students believe that the university should try to change the image of Kent State as the "school where those kids got shot." Although the logo of the school has been switched back and forth throughout the years, alternating between Kent and Kent State, Ron Kirksey, director of University Relations and Marketing at Kent, says it has nothing to do with trying to erase the image of the May 4 shootings.
"The logo is constantly changing, but it is because of marketing," Kirksey says. "My understanding is that media consultants are brought in to see what would be the most popular way to attract more students. For a while, just "Kent" was being used because it was supposed to remind people of other one-word schools, like Yale. Now they are finding that students are liking Kent State again."
The shootings that occurred on May 4 will never be forgotten, no matter how much the students and the administration try to ignore it, says Drew Tiene, professor of instructional technology at Kent State. Tiene has interviewed other Kent State professors and witnesses of May 4 for a documentary he made.
Before their time
The majority of today's undergraduates were not even born in 1970, so it just doesn't interest them, says history major John Fultz.
"I understand the people who attended school back then should come back, but it isn't as important to us today," Fultz says. "It isn't genuine for most students now. They just see it as a day off school. It's not that I don't care - don't get me wrong. It was an important event in 1970. But this is not 1970.
"I think that we should learn about it in history and stuff, but why are we still spending money? How many memorials do we need?"
Even if today's students weren't born in 1970, their parents lived through the period, and that may be the part of the reason that students want to forget about May 4 and Vietnam, Tiene suggests. Many of their parents have strong opinions of disapproval that could have been passed on to their children.
"Parents and members of this community and others are offended because the shootings are memorialized," Tiene says. "They want to suppress it. It reminds them of a really unfortunate incident in U.S. history - one of the worst kinds. There are a lot of people whose orientation is right-wing and pro-Army. Their feelings may be passed on to their children."
Another memorial
In September 1999, the Prentice Hall parking spaces where four students were killed in 1970 were closed and dedicated in their memory. The project was paid for by funds from private donors, including Kent State President Carol Cartwright. Some students thought that this was a good idea. Some were resentful.
"I understand that it might be looked at as disrespectful to have cars parked on the site where people died," Szkatulski says. "It is not that the new memorial isn't a good idea, but it should have been done before. Why do it now? The site on the hill (for the May 4 Memorial) was chosen. When are we going to stop spending money on this?
View of the May 4 Memorial taken in February, 2000. Winters are hard on the granite memorial, which must be able to withstand salting. In warm weather, skateboarders have left some wear and tear. (Susana Harley)
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"We also cannot afford to lose parking spaces when parking on this campus is already crazy. This isn't a cemetery. It's a school."
Honoring the spots where the students died is an important step, Tiene says.
"It's much more powerful to have memorials where the students fell."
Because the granite May 4 Memorial is often disrespected or ignored by students, Szkatulski asks why a new memorial was built.
"There were repair projects that had to be done to the memorial on the hill because of the damage caused by the skateboarding on it," Szkatulski says. "I don't think that those people really cared about the memorial. That seems to be the general attitude of how much students care about May 4."
 
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