The clincher seems to have been his oral exams, a major hurdle, actually a total obstacle, to a high-IQ guy with (looks like to me) Asperger’s Syndrome or a similar pathology.
I know a lot about this for personal reasons I don’t need to go into here, but the “symptoms” reported by classmates scream this out to me. As long as he can do papers or type his thoughts one way or the other, he’s an A+ student.
But his classmates reported he NEVER spoke, except when directly questioned, and then his answeres were the bare minimum. He never “offered his thoughts.” This is a red rocket flare to anybody who knows about Aspergers, or to be PC and use the current terminology, “high functioning autism.”
He would have known from his life experience that he would totally bomb the critical oral exams he had looming. That was when he dropped out. I’ll bet a dollar that he never went to take his oral exam in front of a panel. That was his wall, his barrier.
Just my dos centavos. We shall see what we shall see.
From an article linked off of Drudge:
“Weeks before, Holmes quit a 35-student Ph.D. program in neuroscience for reasons that aren’t clear. He had earlier taken an intense oral exam that marks the end of the first year but University of Colorado Denver officials would not say if he passed, citing privacy concerns.”