These days, McCoy is an associate professor of English at KSU. "I'm much more at home talking about Updike and Faulkner," he is quick to say, comfortable with easy chair and amber computer screen in his Satterfield Hall cubbyhole.

There were those years, though, when the politics of involvement in running a university left McCoy less time to devote to literary scholarship. From 1977 to 1982, McCoy served as executive assistant to Golding, a former colleague from San Diego State.

President Golding took office as the May 4 Coalition camped out on the lawn beside the Memorial Gym, protesting the building of the gym annex on the site where the National Guard marched - on the site where a guardsman's bullet wounded one student.

And as the open wound was passed to a new set of administrators, McCoy drafted a 21-point plan to mend it.

He proposed the account of May 4 printed in the schedule booklets. And he proposed the May 4 information box posted at the entrance of Prentice parking lot and helped write and distribute the brochure that went in it. "I personally refilled the box, driving my car up there first every day, then later every week," he recalls.

McCoy also had ideas that didn't materialize. He proposed a marker with benches around it, meant for sitting and reflecting. "Furthermore we'd have arrows to where the bullets went," he says. "We tried to make it very plain."

With the help of university architect Ted Curtis, he came up with another idea - an arch at the edge of Prentice parking lot, framing the site of the May 4 incident.

"You'd get your little brochure and stand there and see where the National Guard marched up the hill," he explains.

McCoy said the university killed the idea after the Daily Kent Stater likened the work to a triumphal arch, which symbolizes victory in time of war.

"Everything we tried to do was a misinterpretation," McCoy Bays, shaking his head.

About the time the gym annex protests were quelled, Segal accepted the Mildred Andrews Foundation's proposal for a May 4 work and visited the Kent State campus.

During the visit, which took place near the end of spring semester, Segal discussed ideas for the work with the May 4 Observance Committee.

"He listened, asked intelligent questions and was very sensitive about the whole thing," recalls McCoy.

But talking to Segal that day, McCoy got a hint of the problems to come.

"He told me, I've been exploring the Abraham and Isaac story, turning it over in my mind,'" McCoy remembers. "I said, 1 don't know how that would work. We'd better be careful.' "

A few days after Segal visited, the administration wrote to the foundation, accepting the Segal work with conditions. A copy of the letter was sent to Segal.

"The language was, If you have any objections to the conditions, let us know,' " McCoy says. The letter was not a contract.