The school's sports teams are called the Golden Flashes. They compete in the NCAA's Division I-A, and the Mid-American Conference.
The university is best known, outside Ohio, for a single event: The Kent State massacre, when four students were shot by the National Guard on May 4, 1970. A photograph of a 14-year-old runaway girl, kneeling over one of the bodies as she cried, is one of the most enduring images of the event, and it won a Pulitzer Prize for photographer John Filo.