On March 16, 1904, Charles Walter Mesloh, an assistant professor of Germanic Languages at the Ohio State University, committed suicide. Mesloh was the third OSU faculty member to commit suicide within less than a year: on April 8, 1903, Ernst August Eggers, head of the Germanic Languages department, committed suicide, and on September 19, 1903, Frederick Converse Clark, head of the department of economics and sociology, committed suicide. Eggers' motivation was that he was crippled by rheumatism, Clark's was that he had bankrupted both himself and his parents by speculating on gold mines, and Mesloh's was that he had not been selected to replace Eggers.