In late spring, 1977, the campus caught wind of this proposed Gym Annex, an addition to Memorial Gym. (Memorial Gym is dedicated to the men who served in the first and second world wars.) Student activists, including those who were injured in the May 4, 1970, rally, raised hell against the university for trying to cover up the site where Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire seven years prior. The emotions were still bitter. They would fight tooth and nail this time.

"Assuming that it wasn't meant to do any harm, the damage it did was amazing," Schwartz says. "It was a peculiar and badly managed deal. I had only been at the university for 15 months. They let me play president with white shirts and blue collars. We were helping the newspapers sell themselves left and right. I told the media people that they had been treating the university like we were raping people."

Schwartz says the worst blow came when the esteemed Cleveland commentator Dorothy Fultheim unloaded on Kent State one evening in a 90-second editorial broadcast on the evening news.

"She asked, 'Is this a place we send our sons and daughters to be shot and gassed?' She made the assumption that somehow it was the univeristy's fault (for the May 4 shootings) when in fact if over the years there was a neutral party, it was the university. I don't know if the trustees even knew what they were doing."

Added to the students' plight, then-Provost John Snyder announced days before the fourth of May a series of budget cuts at the Center for Peaceful Change, now the Center for Applied Conflict Management. It was the first academic program officially memorializing May 4.