A mosh pit has formed in the middle of a disco-lit dance floor and about seven ruddy-cheeked, muddy-booted college students are throwing themselves around, screaming lyrics to a song blaring out of a portable speaker:
I like the girls that do drugs (Drugs!)
Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club (Club!)
Girls that hate cops and buy guns (Guns!)
Girls with no buns, girls that’s mean just for funs
I like girls who make love, but I love girls who like to fuck
That’s what’s up!
One long-limbed lad in high-waisted jeans, who looks as if he slightly disapproves, has moved off the main dance floor to do some kind of tap dance with the heels of his cowboy boots. A smiling girl in a loose white dress that gives her a fresh-off-the-prairie look has taken off her hiking boots and socks and is floating around near a tall athletic boy sporting a messy blond mop and dirt-spattered Dickies boiler suit.
But the song they’re all moving to doesn’t fit the general vibe of the evening. There is no alcohol here and certainly no drugs. The girls wear minimal or no make-up and, if they’re in a skirt or dress, it falls well below the knee. The “club” is actually a slightly shabby hall with a grand piano and a couple of other musical instruments, while the dance floor comprises a faded Persian rug weighed down by a wooden lectern. A large watercolour painting of an old hydroelectric power plant looms over it all, somehow congruous with the incongruence of the rest.
After a curious assortment of songs, the music stops abruptly and the overhead lights come on. The dozen or so students who are still here make their way out into the darkness of the desert towards their dorm rooms. The “booj”, as these types of quasi-parties are called at Deep Springs College, is over. It is a little after 8 o’clock on a Thursday night on this American college campus, and most of the place is already fast asleep.
The drive here from Los Angeles up along the edge of the Mojave desert is a journey into a different California. Gone are the sandy beaches, palm tree-lined boulevards and traffic jams, replaced by lonely two-lane highways, sun-scorched hillsides dotted with sagebrush and, always in the background, the spectacular, snow-capped Sierra Nevada.
At one point, the route turns off to the north-east and narrows, rapidly gaining altitude and leaving all remaining signs of civilisation behind. Highway 168 snakes dramatically up and past the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, whose gnarled, four-millennia-old trees are the oldest non-clonal organisms on the planet. Then, at just over a mile above sea level, the mountain pass opens out on to a flat, fawn-coloured expanse about twice the size of Manhattan.
In the distance, a patch of vivid green appears: an oasis in the desert. Here, about half way between Yosemite and Death Valley on the California-Nevada border, encircled by the White and Inyo Mountains, lies Deep Springs, possibly the most isolated, probably the most selective and almost certainly the weirdest college in America.
This is a college that not only offers students a top-notch liberal arts education, but also teaches them how to be cowboys. Deep Springs students have to run a working cattle ranch and farm. They select their own teachers, curriculum and fellow students. They pay nothing, instead receiving a full scholarship valued at $50,000, including tuition, room and board. While college fees have soared elsewhere in America, this has remained possible thanks to endowment income, low running costs and donations from foundations, friends and alumni, such as Japanese-American businessman Glen Fukushima (DS67), who recently made a pledge to the college of $3mn.
I’ve come to find out what happens when you let young people be in charge of their own education, rather than being mere consumers of it, and how the campus culture wars that have raged across the US recently play out when the student body numbers 27 and when the only access to the internet is via a shared desktop computer.
Deep Springs was founded in 1917 by Lucien Lucius Nunn, a hydroelectricity magnate from Ohio. As a young man, Nunn had dabbled in hospitality, carpentry, law, real estate and banking, once having a run-in with a gang of bank-robbers whom he unsuccessfully pursued on horseback. (That was OK, in his retelling, since the robber in question was Butch Cassidy.) But it was education that got Nunn really excited, and he devoted the last two decades of his life to preparing “promising young men” for life.
“Gentlemen, ‘For what came ye into the wilderness?’” Nunn wrote in a letter to the student body in 1923, two years before he died of tuberculosis. “You came here to prepare for a life of service, with the understanding that superior ability and generous purpose would be expected of you . . . The desert speaks. Those who listen will hear the purpose, philosophy and ethics of Deep Springs.”
A life-long bachelor, Nunn believed it was crucial that these young men be free from any distractions. That included women until 2018, when Deep Springs became co-ed, after a years-long tussle between conservative and progressive factions on the board of trustees. That’s one of very few of Nunn’s ground rules that have been altered in the college’s history. Most of the others — restrictions on leaving campus, prohibition of drugs and alcohol, and the requirement that students are largely in charge of running the ranch themselves — are still in place 107 years later.
The current Deep Springers seem wholly committed to these principles, and some are keen to further sever connections to the rest of the world. Last year, for instance, the student body voted to ban the use of the internet on personal devices. Recently, motions have been brought seeking to change the exemption in the college’s bylaws that allows students to go to church every Sunday in Bishop — the nearest town, an hour’s drive away — and to ban listening to music through earphones. (Neither passed.)
Even the alcohol ban, one of the few rules that cannot be changed by students, is actively embraced. “It’s just great, like ahh,” Sofia Mikulasek, a frighteningly intelligent 19-year-old with big round glasses and a messy fringe, says one evening over dinner. “Being here has made me really pro prohibition,” she says. “I mean, I guess I was pro prohibition before I came. Well, maybe not at a societal level, but I think in college it’s a good.”
We are eating in the airy, high-ceilinged Boarding House. The meal has been cooked, as always, by the students, guided by a former executive sous chef at The Four Seasons in Baltimore. Tonight, we are having an American spin on fish and chips, followed by banoffee pie, in my honour.
The Deep Springs student tends to be a certain type: earnest, intense, diligent, serious. Without exception, they appear passionate about academic study as well as the two other pillars of their education as laid out by Nunn — labour, which takes up at least 20 hours of the week, and self-governance. They also tend to be incredibly bright. Alumni include three MacArthur fellows and two Pulitzer Prize winners, which doesn’t necessarily sound that impressive — Harvard has 188 and 48 respectively — until you remember that Harvard has a student body of more than 25,000. Deep Springs’ is capped at 30.
Of 843 applicants this year, just 15 were given places — an acceptance rate of less than 2 per cent. (Harvard’s is around 3 per cent.) Submitting SAT scores is optional and “has not served as a major part of our decision to admit students this cycle”, Rania Zaki, the student chair of the applications committee, ApCom, tells me. Much more important are the essays they submit — answering prompts such as “Tell us about a question or idea that has had a profound influence on your thought” — as well as, if they get through the first round, what happens when they are invited to spend six days on campus.
“Hooh-yah!” shouts Tim Gipson, his voice echoing around the nearby mountains. He is sitting, in a pair of elk-hide chaps and cowboy boots, astride a chestnut-coloured quarter horse named Flaco, at the back of a herd of about 100 cattle. Gipson, 66, wears a silk “wild rag” around his neck and a red-and-black plaid Stormy Kromer cap on his crown. In the warmer months, he wears a cowboy hat — which he leaves facing up when he removes it “so the luck don’t fall out” — but it’s January and the temperature is hovering around freezing.
Gipson is a real American cowboy. Born in Ohio, he headed west aged 18 and spent his life working on cattle ranches in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada and elsewhere, before becoming the ranch manager at Deep Springs. He gets up at 4 o’clock every morning to start his work, which includes being in charge of all the animals on the ranch — 350 beef cattle, five dairy cows, 18 horses, four pigs, more than 100 chickens and one mule — as well as teaching every student, and any interested staff or faculty, how to be a cowboy. Every student must take horsemanship lessons in their first year.
“Hyup! Hyup! Huff! Huff!” Gipson shouts, as a cow at the back lurches skittishly forward. “Hoo! Get outta here!”
Low afternoon sun shines hazily through the clouds, making the gentle ripples on Deep Springs Lake shimmer. The cowboys, Gipson and two students, are driving the cattle from the waterside to another patch of pasture a mile away. The valley is quiet, save the cattle calls and the squelching of hooves through mud.
Gipson, an enthusiastic Donald Trump supporter who describes himself as a “dyed in the wool, evangelical, conservative Republican”, has somehow found time to write a novel over the past few years. It’s titled A Dystopian Future Western, and he describes it as a story about what happens “when the wackos take over America”. He had never worked with female cowboys before coming to Deep Springs. But he has been surprised to discover that they often make for better cowboys. (There was talk of changing the name to “cow person” when women joined the college but that didn’t stick.) “Girls have a very intuitive streak. Not all of ’em. But I’ve really enjoyed working with girls; I get a big kick out of it,” he says, noting that he’d never had any daughters. “Part of it is I don’t treat them any differently from the guys; I’m just hard on everybody!”
One of the three cowboys to be chosen this year — many consider it the top labour position, and it appears to carry a certain status at the college — is Anna Zikova, a pretty 19-year-old brunette from Switzerland with fierce blue eyes and a strutty gait. Today, she is trying to show a cocoa-coloured five-year-old steed named Elvis, known for being frisky, that she is in charge. But she’s struggling to get him to cross a particularly boggy patch. “Come on, cows! Let’s go, let’s go!” she shouts, kicking Elvis in the girth a few times with the heels of her cowboy boots.
“Hey!” Gipson bellows. “I just told you to quit hitting him with your heels and you start hitting him with your heels. You turn him into a damn rubber neck mule when you do that!”
Zikova, a talented rider who has been taught in the English style, looks chastened. Gipson softens his tone. “He needs to understand what you’re doing. We don’t wanna punish too much. Boundaries. That’s the word.”
Gipson says the past few years of Deep Springs cohorts have found it more difficult to exercise authority over the horse, so he decided to start teaching leadership as part of the horsemanship class. “They were so reticent to ask the horse to do something, to impose their will on another sentient being,” he says. “They have been so indoctrinated to think: oh that would be abusive. It’s becoming more and more that way. The students are becoming less and less inclined to provide the leadership necessary for the horse.”
On the day I arrive at Deep Springs, the New York Times is running a story describing a pro-Palestine demonstration by students at Columbia University who say they have been sprayed with chemicals by police. It’s the latest in a swath of protests that have broken out on college campuses all across America. But at Deep Springs, I see no “Free Palestine” graffiti, hear no chanting of “From the river to the sea” and, indeed, hear no mention of the war at all.
Later, I find the boy who was tap-dancing at the booj. Noah Silva, 19, is reading The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, a 13th-century history of the saints, during a free period in the Boarding House. I ask him why nobody is talking about Gaza. He pauses and reflects soberly. Deep Springers rarely answer questions without pausing and reflecting soberly. “There is some polarisation on those issues, but there isn’t any social incentive to do protests or anything like that,” he replies. “No one has the desire to put on a show in that way here, and there isn’t any pressure to.”
Despite having grown up in Silver Lake in Los Angeles, Silva talks with a strangely British twang. He has the intonation and delivery style of a priest, which he is considering as a possible career. On his rare vacations — the Deep Springs academic year is a lot longer than at regular colleges, largely because the ranch needs to be run and the animals looked after — he sings Gregorian chant in a cathedral in downtown LA.
“We don’t get the Instagram infographics,” he continues. “And we don’t have the connections to larger political groups you would have at larger colleges, so those kinds of inflammatory resources just aren’t available here. The action we can take from here is not necessarily the action you could take at a larger university. No one is going to care if there is a mass walkout of 26 students at Deep Springs over the Israel-Palestine conflict. So that improves dialogue.”
The experimental nature of Deep Springs — plus the fact that bright young people tend to be progressive — means most of the applicants lean left, according to Walker Harris, a 20-year-old from Boston. He’s also a member of ApCom, the standing committee that deals with new applicants, and would like to accept a cohort of students who reflect a wide range of world views, but he says that’s tricky. “I’ve found it hard to find a smart, interesting conservative,” he says. (Harris considers himself a classical liberal.) “A political discourse centred exclusively around various positions on the left does not prepare young people to serve.”
Harris was at New York University before coming here and has worked as a cocktail waiter in a bar in Tribeca, so he seems a little more worldly than many of the students, especially those straight out of high school, and somewhat less earnest. “My best friend Kenya calls and she says, ‘How’s your cult?’ and I’m like, ‘it’s good’!”
Every Friday night at 8 o’clock, the student body gathers in a cosy, ramshackle living room in the dorm house, and tonight I have the honour of being allowed in to observe. (This is rather unusual and had to be debated on by the student body beforehand. I am under strict instructions not to contribute, not that I would dare.) A tapestry of old record sleeves covers most of the ceiling, Soviet propaganda peels off the walls and a half-completed 3D puzzle of Rome’s Colosseum sits on a low table in the centre of the room.
Will O’Hara, 21 and one of the student cowboys, has to be up before dawn to go on a cattle drive. But for now he has more existential matters to contemplate. He squeezes his sturdy six-foot-five frame on to the edge of a bookcase, sticks his feet up on a nearby sofa and addresses the room: “This school needs a reckoning.”
O’Hara is wearing faded blue jeans, brown Birkenstock clogs and a vintage white T-shirt that reads “40 isn’t usually this sexy”. “It’s not enough,” he says, “to just focus on the immediate needs of those around you. Deep Springs has made me care less about the world and more about myself, because it’s so hard to live here. I guess I’m just scared, because I feel like we’ve focused so much on ourselves that we’ve become indifferent. I don’t want us to be indifferent. I want us to serve.”
The students click their fingers, signalling their agreement. They are squashed together in a messy circle on sofas and chairs around the room, some of them cuddled up together under blankets. Silva paces around at the back of the room in his cowboy boots. Some of the students are working on patterns for their weaving class, one of the classes they have collectively chosen for this semester, taught by a visiting professor they have also collectively chosen. Other courses for this semester include one on “non-Euclidean geometry” and one on Plato’s Republic.
O’Hara describes the disillusionment he feels at being stuck in the middle of nowhere, unable to leave, while the wider world is in turmoil. His exasperation is one that Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman from New Jersey and nominee for the Senate, can relate to deeply. Kim was a second year at Deep Springs when the planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11 2001. He had been up before the sunrise to harvest the late-season tomatoes and was unaware of what had happened until he returned to the main campus for breakfast. When he learnt of the attack, he wanted to go back home immediately, but he was stuck. “I was so angry at being in the middle of the desert on a cattle ranch on the other side of the country — it was awful, I felt so disconnected,” he tells me over the phone from Washington, DC.
But it ended up being a formative moment. “If September 11 didn’t happen, I would probably be a microbiologist,” he said. “But because of that experience at Deep Springs, I immediately decided I wanted to go into foreign policy, and the teachers helped me think that through.” He says the college’s focus on serving others is something that has stayed with him. “I’ve asked myself every day: how can I be of service to humanity? It changed my life. It’s the only place in the world I would say that about.”
After O’Hara’s address, the meeting follows a template. There’s “communal noise”, where students come up with ridiculous ideas and vote for their favourite. One idea put forward tonight is that I be inducted into the student body but it is, alas, not voted through. Then they share some of the week’s choicest quotes, and some updates and announcements. O’Hara asks if anyone wants to watch 12 hours straight of Che Guevara footage with him on the communal TV one day. A few students stick their hands up keenly.
The meeting moves on to more serious matters, motions brought by students and “ideological discussions”. This evening there is an impassioned, two-hour debate over a motion brought to move the voting system to a quadratic system, in which votes are given weight according to how much you care about that particular issue. Many students feel very strongly that this should be at least given a try, but many worry that it will deepen any existing divisions. Ultimately, the motion is not passed.
Just past 1am — after “dialogic space”, during which students give each other brutally honest feedback on the way they performed during the evening — proceedings are called to an end. This, apparently, has been a relatively short meeting.
“What did you think?” I’m asked.
“I was really impressed by all of you,” I say, panicking. “You’re so thoughtful and arcitul . . . artit . . . ” I stutter.
“Yeah.”
Whether it’s because a 19-year-old has to explain to you that’s not how you milk a cow, or an 18-year-old has to explain to you what a hyperbolic plane is, or because you can’t articulate the word “articulate”, it is hard to not constantly feel foolish as a visitor at Deep Springs. And I leave the valley behind me the next morning.
Jemima Kelly is an FT columnist
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