In 1965 he earned a bachelor's degree "with honors" in American Studies from California State University, Los Angeles, at a time when anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights marches were growing on U.S. college campuses.
The latter two formed the advisory committee for his research thesis on "A History of Latter-day Saint Proselytizing Efforts to the Jewish People," a summary article of which appeared in BYU Studies (1968).
With his wife and infant daughter, Green returned in the summer of 1967 to Los Angeles, where at UCLA he began pursuing a Ph.D. in modern Near Eastern history/Arabic.
A Fulbright-Hays grant funded 18 months of research in France and Tunisia (1970–72) for the dissertation on The Tunisian Ulama, 1873–1915: Social Structure and Response to Ideological Currents, which was published by E. J. Brill (Leiden, Netherlands).
[2] During 1972–73, while Andrew Sandler was on sabbatical leave, Green replaced him as a visiting professor at the University of Miami, where he taught courses on the modern Middle East[broken anchor], sub-Saharan Africa, and the Jewish experience.