Bob Dylan Flunked Out of a College Class for Being Too Compassionate

Bob Dylan has a reputation for being a prickly celebrity, but he also has a soft side, as he proved in a college class. According to Dylan, he flunked out of an important course while enrolled at the University of Minnesota. He shared why his refusal to participate put a dent in his short-lived academic career. 

Bob Dylan didn’t last long in a college science class

While Dylan was beginning to take his music career seriously as a high school student, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota to live up to his parents’ expectations. His cousin was the president of a fraternity and agreed to let him stay in the fraternity house the summer before classes started. 

Dylan was excited to be in Minneapolis but not as interested in his courses. His attendance record was spotty at best, and he told The New York Times he flunked out of his science class for “refusing to watch a rabbit die.” His empathy was noble, but it didn’t help his academic career. He left the university after one year. 

Bob Dylan was more focused on music than his studies in college

Dylan didn’t earn a degree, but he did grow as a musician while in Minneapolis. He spent his time in Dinkytown, the area around the school. Here, he learned about music.

“I found the local record store in the heart of Dinkytown,” he wrote in his book Chronicles: Volume One. “What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record right then and there, even borrowing the hammering-on style.”

He also began to perform at the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a local coffee shop. Here, he met some of his early mentors. He spent hours with his fellow musicians, listening to music and watching them perform. Dylan had always avidly consumed music, but this expanded his pool of influences. By harmonizing with other musicians, he learned new songs and how to perform them. While his academic career may have been short-lived, he grew quite a bit while in college.

He discovered Woody Guthrie while at school

One of the most important things to happen to Dylan in college was discovering Woody Guthrie. He was Dylan’s biggest influence as a young musician, pushing him to write protest music and affect an accent when he sang.

“The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category,” Dylan wrote. “They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them. Not one mediocre song in the bunch. Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor.”

He felt his life change the moment he heard Guthrie’s songs.

“That day I listened all afternoon to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before,” he wrote. “A voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’ I could sing all these songs, every single one of them and they were all that I wanted to sing. It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.”