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deteriorating situation in Vietnam. Since Max’s draft number was 321, he wasn’t concerned with the military, but he also didn’t see much reason to stay at Yale.
    â€œMom, I really don’t see any point to it. The teachers aren’t as good as those I studied with at Andover, School Year Abroad, or even Hackley,” he complained. “I mostly just go to three or four films a night at the film societies, and the rest of the time I’m pretty much bored with my classes.”
    â€œPut a little more effort into connecting with your teachers and the other students, and I’m sure you’ll have a better experience,” Jane advised. “The important thing is not to give up—your education is too important.”
    â€œI’ll stay if it makes you happy,” he conceded, “But it just seems like a waste of time and money.”
    â€œTrust me on this,” she implored. “You’ll have more power in your adult life if you see this through and graduate. And believe me, you will want that power.
    â€œSo promise me you’ll stay and graduate. Please, Max.”
    Not wanting to disappoint his mother, he promised.
    ***
    Despite his sense of alienation, however, Max did have friends at school, including Archibald Benson—who had been part of the student group that went to Barcelona—Chris Garvey, and Carl Becker.
    At the beginning of the ten-day spring break, Chris and Carl approached Max with the suggestion that he try some of their hash brownies, and he felt there was little to lose.
    A huge proportion of students at Yale in 1968 dabbled with drugs. It was part of the college culture, which also embraced the radical changes in music and fashion.
    Much to the delight of Chris and Carl, a hungry Max devoured the brownies, though unexpectedly, instead of getting high, he fell into a deep sleep that lasted a full forty-eight hours.
    ***
    Max woke up filled with energy and alive with new ideas. Over the course of the ten-day break, he devoured all of the textbooks required for his five academic courses. He felt no need to sleep and would nap for twenty minutes or an hour at a time, but no more than that.
    Max returned to the Yale campus, and the night before his philosophy exam he wrote the final draft of a paper that had been assigned by his professor Robert Fox, with whom he shared many physical characteristics. The instruction was, “According to Whitehead’s Modes of Thought, Write a Critique of Yale’s System of Education.”
    Alfred North Whitehead was considered the world’s leading systems thinker and had explained how all knowledge was contained within the limits and possibilities of the systems in which human beings interacted. Max saw in a flash that the ultimate limitation was being human.
    He also realized that it was only by being fully human, and allowing feelings and emotions to enter into the analytical realm of scientific investigation that true understanding could be achieved. Clearly Yale was underperforming in this regard, he concluded. The university had compartmentalized every aspect of every subject, dividing them into specialties, with the instructors and lecturers talking with each other but not with anyone outside of the closed system. The students were learning more and more about less and less and were coming no closer to—and indeed farther and farther away from—Whitehead’s goal of “understanding understanding.”
    At the same time as he was preparing to write the paper, Max finished reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, the account of the Black Panther movement and the rage felt by blacks who had been oppressed under the restrictions and injustice of the legal system in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the language used by Cleaver was caustic, even violent.
    Influenced by such language and finding it effective, Max wrote his eighteen-page philosophy