McLuhan wrote his final exams at Cambridge in 1936, and received good, although not distinguished, marks. Returning to North America, he landed a job as teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. Meanwhile he worked on his doctoral thesis for Cambridge, which was eventually finished and accepted by that university in 1943. The thesis was a typically sweeping McLuhan project—an examination of the trivium, the medieval curriculum consisting of logic, grammar and rhetoric.
McLuhan was fascinated by the Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus and Thomas More, who led the revolt against the Scholastic philosophers of the late Middle Ages, a period when logic was supreme. Like modern-day
