Education: Jag

A depraved poet once pointed out that all men kill the thing they love, some with a sword, some with a word. Last week Joseph Carson, Jr., who had loved knowledge but found more of it in the head of his friend than in his own, tried to kill knowledge with his fists, with a shoe, with a dressing gown and a milk bottle.

When Joseph Carson Jr., a mild-mannered boy whose parents live in Manhattan, was voted “most brilliant” and “most intellectual” by his classmates (’21) at Princeton University, few who voted for him knew him save by sight and reputation. He was a scholarly recluse and passed much of his time in the company of a few kindred spirits of whom the leader was Lawrence Buermeyer of Reading, Pa., a graduate student and later a member of the Princeton Faculty. The friendship between Carson and Buermeyer survived their student days. They took it with them and kept it alive in New York City, where Lawrence obtained a position on the philosophical faculty of New York University, Joseph instructing in the same subject at Columbia.

But it was never quite an even friendship. Mr. Carson, the younger of the two, secretly envied his friend’s intellectual equipment and attainments. Mr. Buermeyer, though not conceited, was occasionally made conscious of his superiority, real or imaginary, and sometimes adopted his old air of omniscient graduate student talking to callow undergraduate.

One afternoon last week the friends met in Philosopher Buermeyer’s apartment and settled themselves to drink a bottle of grain alcohol. They mixed the fiery fluid with water, pursued recondite subjects. With each drink, a more hysterical note crept into Joseph Carson’s voice. Jealousy gnawed. To shake it off, he blurted bitter taunts, taunts so childish that Prof. Buermeyer brushed them easily aside until he was bored, then dropped his woozy head and fell asleep. Infuriated, Philosopher Carson shouted at him to sit up and talk philosophy. The alcohol inflaming one mind had, however, quite numbed the other and not even a shoe, which Mr. Carson picked up and hurled, could revive the argument. Transported with drunken rage, Philosopher Carson sprang at the sleeper, raining blows with the shoe upon the lolling head. Prof. Buermeyer slid from his chair to the floor. Mr. Carson, panting, mixed and drank another tumbler of alcohol and water, glared blearily at the body, then fell asleep himself. Hours later he awoke and, without looking to see how his friend fared, staggered home for more sleep.

Next day, still fogged with raw fumes, he made his way back to Buermeyer’s rooms. The man lay where he had left him, inert. The sight precipitated fresh mania and Mr. Carson attacked once more, exhorting his opponent to “stand up and take it.” Buermeyer was unconscious. He felt nothing during ensuing minutes when his assailant kicked, beat, bashed him with a milk bottle, shoved him around the floor with a broomstick, tried to smother him with a dressing gown. He lay so limp, with blood streaming from ear, nose, jaw, forehead and the base of his skull, that Carson was suddenly seized with cold terror.

He tried to drag Buermeyer into the bathtub to revive him. He chafed him, fanned him, groaned his name. Then he telephoned for an ambulance, gave himself up to the police, told the story, in detail too brutal to print. Sober at tail too brutal to print. Sober, he said: “I must have been crazed.”

With Buermeyer lying between life and death in Bellevue Hospital and Carson under $10,000 bail, the Columbia-University authorities, profoundly shocked, withheld decision as to their course of action. “Mr. Carson,” said Professor Coss, his department chief, “was a thorough gentleman, a sincere student and an excellent teacher.”

All sorts of homilies went the rounds, from the obvious one about “a little learning” to equally trite observations on the evils of Prohibition, of which, many recalled, President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University has long been a loud opponent.

Superlative

Johns Hopkins* University, which rates itself and is often rated as the first and last word in U. S. higher education, last week rounded off its semicentennial celebration, begun last winter (TIME, March 1). It was a superlative event, demanding a superlative program.

First they dedicated a new million-dollar School of Hygiene and Public Health with words of appreciation for the co-operation of the John D. Rockefellers, father and son. The presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. John Gardner Murray of Baltimore, pronounced the invocation. Dr. Andrew Balfour, head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, had come across the Atlantic to speak.

Then they memorialized the foundation of the Philosophical Faculty, presenting President Frank J. Goodnow with a parchment illuminated in gold and blue showing how highly they esteemed him. Professor L. Levy-Bruhl of the philosophical faculty of the Sorbonne was on the program to discuss “Research As It Is Today.”

Then the alumni met, and a more distinguished group of graduates it would have been hard to find. To officiate at this meeting they had obtained the services of that scholar-politician who is often called “the best U. S. speech-maker”: onetime (1916-21) Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. In the gathering were: the first man to receive a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins, Dr. Ernest G. Sihier** of New York University; the first man to receive a Johns Hopkins M. D., Dr. Charles R. Bardeen of the University of Wisconsin; the first woman to receive a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins, Dr. Florence Bascom, head of the geology department of Bryn Mawr College. Other alumni: Director George Otis Smith of the U. S. Geological Survey; President Cyrus Adler of the Jewish Theological Seminary (Manhattan) ; U. S. Minister to Denmark J. Dyneley Prince; Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin of Princeton University; Dean Gordon J. Laing of the graduate school of arts and literature of the University of Chicago.

In reports on the celebration, the public was reminded of salient facts about Johns Hopkins:

That its original purpose and policy of training graduate students and performing research work has been returned to, with the abolishment of freshman and sophomore courses.

That for 50 years there has been each year among Johns Hopkins’ matriculants an average of one potential college or university president, and 29 college professors.

That, counting only living alumni, Johns Hopkins has turned out educators sufficient to man 50 college faculties. (Contrary to the popular impression Johns Hopkins produces more educators than physicians.)

That, according to famed Electro-Mechanist Michael Idvorsky Pupin of Columbia University: “No rich man in the United States should die without leaving something to Johns Hopkins, the pioneer university of the United States.”

Malcontent

In Pulaski County, Ky., Teacher Bertha Mize of the Short Creek School, thirsty, drew herself a glass of water from the school cooler. It looked, she thought, a little queer. The water seemed cloudy. Lifting the cooler lid, she was startled by a puff of smoke. None of the 70 pupils had taken a drink yet that morning, so none was poisoned by what authorities judged to be sulphuric acid dumped into the cooler by the same malcontent or malcontents who two days prior had smashed the school window panes and electric lights. Between Fundamentalists and Evolutionists of that countryside, suspicion was mutual.

*Johns Hopkins (1795-1873), son of English Quakers in Maryland, built up a wholesale grocery business in Baltimore, starting in his 25th year with money from a moneyed uncle. He built so well that he was able to do private banking in a big way, extending credit and signing notes for the Baltimore & Ohio R. R. and, during the panic of 1873, for many a Baltimore and Philadelphia firm. He aided Southerners after the Civil War with credit, meeting George Peabody who was doing the same thing. Here was a coincidence: both men were bachelors, both had made fortunes of ten millions, Peabody by advancing cash, Hopkins by advancing credit. Johns Hopkins learned that George Peabody had given Harvard University an institute of archaeology, Yale an institute of physical science. “There are two memorials that will live forever,” mused childless Mr. Peabody. “A university. . . a hospital. . . .” Childless Mr. Hopkins soon left $3,500,000 for a university, $3,500,000 for a hospital.

**In his class (’78) were also the late Dr. Josiah Royce, Harvard philosopher ; Dr. Henry C. Adams, University of Michigan political economist; Dr. Thomas Craig, editor of The American Journal of Mathematics.