Students at Isolated California Campus Labor for Learning

A typical college day for Greg Cumberfort begins at 5 a.m. in a subfreezing dairy, milking four cows named Hope, Will, Patience and Despair.

After a cast-iron bell signals a quick breakfast, he heads for classes that include voice lessons, American labor history and the writings of religion philosophers Thomas Merton and Simone Weil.

The afternoon is spent reading, attending a meeting to select a new physical science teacher and joining fellow student Ted Shelton for more dairy work before dinner.

In the evening, he addresses the entire college on a subject he has been given only half an hour to prepare: “Should politicians be required to hold second jobs?”

Just a typical day at Deep Springs College, a school that each year since 1917 has gathered about 20 of America’s brightest students to study liberal arts, work a cattle and alfalfa ranch and exercise an almost unparalleled degree of self-governance.

No Tuition

Another eye-catching feature of Deep Springs: It’s free. Every student is on full scholarship, provided by income from the school’s $1.6-million endowment, its alumni and other contributions, and the proceeds of the farm.

It may well be the least-known and most secluded college in the country--located in a central California desert valley 30 miles southeast of the nearest town, Bishop, and 220 miles northwest of the nearest city, Las Vegas.

The all-male student body faces two monastic years without television, movies, cars, alcohol or girlfriends. Most transfer to Cornell, Harvard, Berkeley or similar top colleges to complete their bachelor’s degrees.

Standardized test scores rank them with the very best students in the country. Opher Donchin, a second year student from Urbana, Ill., scored a nearly perfect 750 on his verbal SAT and 730 on the math section.

But he tells a visitor that Deep Springers consider it “very uncool” to talk about test scores.

These super achievers choose to spend their first two college years at Deep Springs because they find a community with few distractions other than occasional Frisbee games or hikes in the surrounding mountains and desert--a community that challenges mind, body and character as few other colleges can.

Feeding the Bulls

David Goldfarb, an 18-year-old from the affluent Cleveland suburb of Beechwood, Ohio, has learned to fearlessly feed bulls 75-pound bales of hay. He said he visited a number of top schools before choosing Deep Springs.

“I found Harvard very depressing,” Goldfarb said. “Everyone seemed to have parties to discuss how they had no time to get their work done. Deep Springs seemed a little more serious to me.”

Homework definitely gets done here, and students rarely skip class. It is hard to be lazy in classes of fewer than six students.

Even fads tend to be serious. The current rage is Eastern European literature, including works by two Poles, Czeslaw Milosz and Jan Jozef Szczepanski. The latter is a key figure in the Solidarity labor movement who has agreed to teach a term at Deep Springs but is having trouble getting a passport.

Students typically hear about Deep Springs through alumni or through mass mailings aimed at exceptional high school students.

Students like Cumberfort, who grew up in Westport, Conn., often come from city or suburban backgrounds. But at Deep Springs they will slaughter beef, weld broken farm machinery, churn butter, bale hay and dig irrigation ditches.

Low Number of Applications

President Brandt Kehoe said that even with no tuition, only about 70 or 80 high school students apply each year--a low number he attributes to the school’s remoteness, men-only policy and an unusually demanding application that requires writing 11 essays.

And students abide by a rigid “isolation policy.” The school year starts and ends in June, and students are not supposed to leave the ranch except for one-week breaks between the six academic terms and a month off for Christmas.

Despite its unusual trappings, Deep Springs is in many ways conservative, even old-fashioned--certainly not experimental. Tests, grades and term papers, for example, are necessities for students planning to transfer somewhere else.

Life and learning here have changed remarkably little in 68 years.

The school was founded by Lucien L. Nunn, who grew wealthy developing power plants in Colorado, Utah, Montana and Idaho. He saw a need to train and educate the men he hired and eventually turned his time and fortune to putting his then-radical educational ideas into practice.

In a 1923 letter to students that Deep Springs men still fondly quote, Nunn laid out the school’s philosophy: “Great leaders in all ages have sought the desert and heard its voice. You can hear it if you listen, but you cannot hear it while in the midst of uproar and strife for material things. Gentlemen, ‘For what came ye into the desert?’ Not for conventional scholastic training, not to become proficient in commercial or professional pursuits for personal gain. You came to prepare for a life of service. . . .”

Leisure Earned With Labor

Nunn believed the leisure to study had to be earned with physical labor.

And he believed students could learn the meaning of duty and leadership only if granted responsibility for governing. Since its founding, Deep Springs has allowed students a permanent seat on the board of trustees. And students have a say in who is admitted, who is invited back for a second year, even who will teach.

But Nunn was also elitist. He wanted to train only the brilliant, “the few,” for lives of service and leadership.

Kehoe, a student here in the early 1950s, insists Deep Springs’ obscurity is not from any wish to be secretive, but because it has only 600 living alumni, all of whom transferred to other schools after two years to complete their bachelor’s degrees.

Among its alumni: CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood, Virginia Rep. James Olin, former U.N. representative William vanden Heuvel, recently retired University of Rochester President Robert Sproull, Chief Judge Thomas Fairchild of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and many physicians, scholars, writers and business figures.

Only two courses are required, composition and public speaking, the latter a common enough college requirement in 1917, but a rarity today on American campuses.

Other course offerings vary depending on what teachers are available in a given term. French and German are nearly always offered, as are calculus, physics, chemistry and other sciences and humanities.

Focus on Narrower Subjects

Wide-ranging survey courses are rare. Instead, teachers offer more intense examinations of narrower subjects. Entire courses are devoted, for example, to Henry James, Utopian novels and theories of social violence.

The current freshman class of nine is taking one such course, Love in the Western World, which looks at how the subject of love is treated in Western literature.

A recent class dealt with Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” with the question under discussion, “What is ecstasy?” Said freshman Charles Abbott of Rochester, N.Y., “It’s contemplating something larger than yourself. In Plato, it might be the idea of ‘perfect beauty.’ Or it might be God. Or the square root of 2.”

Few things stir more debate than Deep Springs’ hidebound policy against admitting women. Current students generally seem to favor admitting women, as does Kehoe.

But the school’s older trustees have successfully resisted coeducation, said Kehoe, because Nunn specified Deep Springs was to be a college for men and because large alumni contributors oppose it.

A study of Deep Springs by L. Jackson Newell, dean of liberal education at the University of Utah and himself a former student and faculty member of Deep Springs, calls the school’s all-male policy “something of an anachronism.”

“I miss my girlfriend often,” Cumberfort said. “In June, she’s going to come out here and ‘take me away,’ sort of a symbolic act.”