In an article on the weekend’s student rioting at Kent State, the Associated Press makes the following claim:

“It was the first clash between Kent State students and police since 1970, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.”

Ouch. That’s really really not true.

First, as Kent State’s student newspaper reported in the fifth paragraph of its article on the weekend riots, 81 Kent students were arrested when Halloween parties in and around the campus got out of hand last year. That’s less than six months ago.  

Also, as the AP itself notes, the 1970 “clash” wasn’t between students and police, since National Guard troops aren’t cops. Finally, there have been lots of student protests where students clashed with cops at Kent State since 1970 — a two-minute Google turned up this page about a series of 1977 protests on campus that led to about two hundred arrests.

Student protest and student rowdiness are both common on American campuses — they were common before the sixties, and they’ve been common since. An AP reporter really shouldn’t have to be told this.

Update: Dear Volokh Conspiracy, if you’re going to make the title of a blog post a question, you really should enable comments.