The Light That Failed

When Roy G. Jacobsen, 26, of Long Valley, N.J., switched from Dartmouth to Columbia University in 1951, he had some pretty exalted notions about what he was after. He wanted nothing less than to arn all about truth, understanding, integrity, enlightenment, justice, liberty, courage, honesty and critical judgment--the very virtues he saw extolled on countless plaques and friezes about Columbia's campus. But after searching for the light, first a physics and then as an English major, Jacobsen gave up. In his senior year, he flunked four courses, and the college refused to give him his degree. Last week, when Columbia filed suit against him for $1,000 for repayment of a student loan, Jacobsen lashed back with a suit of his own. Columbia, he said in court, is guilty of "false representation" for not telling him that "it was not equipped to teach pure reason"--and wisdom. Jacobsen demanded $2,000 for every year he wasted at the college, plus cancellation of his $1,000 debt, plus $1,000 for the tuition had paid and $16 for legal expenses. Speaking for the college, Dean Lawrence Chamberlain said that wisdom is only "a hoped-for end product of education," and that neither Columbia nor any other institution could teach it. But that argument did not impress embattled Jacobsen one bit. After all, with two other students, he is now learning wisdom, truth, understanding, etc., at a special school in Long Valley called Gurukula (home of the philosopher)--a school, he told reporters, that is very much like Plato's Academy. The Plato of the place: Harry Jakobsen, a $100-a-week tool designer-turned-guru. At week's end a somewhat mystified Superior Judge Frederick Hall gave Columbia until Jan. 3 to file an answer to Jacobsen's counterclaim.

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