The Kent State Shootings: Another Professor is Careless with the Facts

I just discovered a post on the Facebook site "Kent State May 4th," which contains one of the worst booboos I've seen in a while. There, in a post by Gregory Payne, a professor of rhetoric at Emerson College (I like to call him "The Professor with the Suspicious Footnotes," because his footnotes do not match his text), was a photograph of Dean Kahler, Carl Barbato, and Tom Hensley, along with Payne's caption: "Heroes for Justice at Kent State."

Of the three individuals Payne portrays as heroes, only one of them, Dean Kahler, actually took part in the efforts to see that justice was done. Neither Barbato nor Hensley nor anyone else on the faculty showed much interest in the victims' struggle for justice.

That includes one credit-thieving professor, Jerry M. Lewis, who tried to convince me he helped the parents get a federal grand jury. He was so out of the loop that he did not realize he was talking to one of then-students who actually worked with parents and the students who petitioned for the grand jury investigation. In fact, Arthur Krause once warned his supporters: "That man is not to be trusted."

No one on the faculty did anything more than sign an ineffectual faculty resolution asking for the federal grand jury or sign the students' petition.