The coursework was so stunningly inane, the other children so dull, that Finkle-McGraw developed a poor attitude. He earned some repute as a wrestler and cross-country runner, but never exploited it for sexual favors, which would have been easy enough in the promiscuous climate of the times. He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year running certain parts of his parents' agricultural business and then attended Iowa State University of Science and Technology ("Science with Practice") in Ames. He enrolled as an agricultural engineering major and switched to physics after his first quarter. While remaining a nominal physics major for the next three years, he took classes in whatever he wanted: information science, metallurgy, early music.

He never earned a degree, not because of poor performance but because of the political climate; like many universities at the time, ISU insisted that its students study a broad range of subjects, including arts and humanities. Finkle-McGraw chose instead to read books, listen to music, and attend plays in his spare time. One summer, as he was living in Ames and working as a research assistant in a solid-state physics lab, the city was actually turned into an island for a couple of days by an immense flood.

Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once again he was struck by the national media coverage– reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, that there had been no looting. The lesson learned during the Sioux City plane crash was reinforced. The Los Angeles riots of the previous year provided a vivid counterexample.