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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 appro