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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.