Bowdoin's President, William Dewitt Hyde helped Snow attain the scholarship he needed to finance his studies.

One of Snow's students was Carl Van Doren, to whom he introduced the works of Herman Melville, then in total obscurity.

But Snow rebelled at the rigid academic degree progression and told Ashley Horace Thorndike, head of Columbia's English Department, that the PhD "was a German invention designed to turn an art into a science."

One of his favorite students was James Phinney Baxter III who shared Snow's disdain for the academic rigamarole and nearly got tossed out as a result.

It took the President of Miami only ten days to decide he talked "too plainly with undergraduates about politics and religion" and ask him to leave.

Snow was saved at that point by an invitation by a former Bowdoin friend to become an Eskimo teacher and reindeer agent in Alaska, which he did from 1911 to 1912.

At that point he received an appointment to the faculty at the University of Utah where he spent two stormy years because of his political views (opposing the reelection of Mormon Apostle Reed Smoot as United States Senator) and support of Academic Freedom more generally.

It nearly didn't happen when someone wrote President William Arnold Shanklin that Snow was too far to the left of center for his aggressive support of the League of Nations.

With a new appointment firmly in hand, Snow married Jeannette Simmons and planned a delayed honeymoon in Europe for the summer of 1922.

While Snow "survived" at Wesleyan, the early years were a tough go for the same reason previous positions had; his leftist politics.

He was also aided by the administration in attracting two campus visits by his friend Carl Sandburg (whom he always claimed to have "taught" the difference between poetry and the ballads Sandburg was already expert at) and by the publication of his first book of poetry, Maine Coast, which so impressed Acting President Stephen H. Olin that he said to the Wesleyan trustees, "The man who wrote these poems cannot be evil."

The two became fast friends, and Frost spent several long sojourns at Wesleyan, conversing with students around the dinner table and fireplace in Snow's home.

Following Snow's retirement from Wesleyan in 1952, he was a visiting professor at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges and induced Frost to come south to work with the students there.

After much work and effort, he completed his autobiography published as "Codline's Child" named after the midwife who had birthed him,[3] his parents being unable to afford bringing a doctor out to White Head Island.