SCHOOL on the RANGE : Milking Cows, Hiring Faculty, Debating De Tocqueville--a Day’s Work at the Strangest Little College in America

THERE IS NO EASY way to get to Deep Springs Valley. From any direction, the terrain is the same: bustling interstates turning into smaller roads that narrow as they creep upward through the high desert of eastern California. Finally, a thin, serpentine road crawls through a craggy mountain pass, then dips into an expanse of desolate flatland.

The valley lies silent, nearly empty. A saltwater lake marks one end. A two-lane highway runs down the center. But in one corner, a stand of cottonwood trees conceals a well-kept secret: Deep Springs College, perhaps the finest small college in America--and probably the strangest.

Cut off from civilization by a series of mountain ranges, Deep Springs is similarly separated from the academic world. Its tiny, all-male enrollment comes from the top of the college applicant pool; the 21 students all scored in the highest 2% on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

They pay no tuition, room or board and share one of the nation’s largest campuses, 2,500 acres of sprawling desert. In exchange for the free ride, students are required to work on the college’s ranch, doing everything from tending the 280 head of cattle to farming alfalfa.

John (Buzz) Anderson, president of the college, explains his school’s attraction by gesturing as if he’s performing rigorous manual labor. “The students we get are those interested in growing this way as well as”--he points to his head--”this way.”

Deep Springs students also may not leave the valley without permission but otherwise have almost total control over their lives there. They help admit new students, hire professors and set the curriculum.

“This isn’t just going to college and getting smart and going home and getting on with your life,” says Scott Edelson, a first-year student from Edina, Minn. “For two years, this is life.”

IT IS BEFORE DAWN. Under a clear, starlit sky, a blues tune crackles from speakers in a dairy barn. First-year student Hugh Seid stumbles through a muddy field, trying to wake a cow named Malice. “Come on, girl,” the 19-year-old says, landing a kick on the side of the Brown Swiss. “You know the game.”

A moment later, Seid struggles to lead Malice and three other cows through the darkness to the barn. “At some point, they tell me, they start to respond to your voice,” he says. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

Deep Springs’ labor program--combined with its demanding academic plan and the peculiarities that naturally arise at an institution in the middle of nowhere--makes the all-male college different from any other. Throughout the day, students can be found driving tractors or feed trucks along campus roads. Occasionally, one hurries from class to rope calves.

Like many of his classmates, Seid first heard of Deep Springs from the annual nationwide mailing the college sends to students with the top scores on the SAT. A San Diego resident, he had been considering attending UC Berkeley, UCLA or Yale but had little enthusiasm for college until he learned about Deep Springs and its work requirements.

“I read the brochure and sort of instinctively knew I was going to come here,” he says.

In many ways, Seid is the typical Deep Springs student: He was far brighter than average in high school, he sought something out of the ordinary from college and he had little exposure to manual labor.

So far, he has worked four to seven hours a day in a variety of positions--as campus office assistant; as driver, traveling out of the valley on college errands; as general laborer, performing maintenance jobs and ranch tasks, and as “boardinghouse” person, washing dishes and cleaning the dining hall kitchen. This is Seid’s second week as dairy boy, and he’s learning the ropes with the help of his predecessor. He’s still getting used to the hours--waking before 5 a.m. every day--and the duties--milking the cows twice a day.

Since life at Deep Springs revolves around the ranch, the school operates year-round, with six seven-week terms separated by one-week breaks (and more for Christmas). To accommodate the outdoor labor, the college stays permanently on daylight-saving time. Classes are scheduled around students’ work assignments. During breaks, a handful of students stay to look after the ranch.

What the students say they gain from their labor assignments is a feel for working with their hands and a sense of being a vital part of their community.

Edelson, 20, describes Deep Springs as a hands-on lesson in collective effort--the kind of experience that is idealized and intellectualized elsewhere.

“You learn here that community is not some touchy-feely liberal idea,” he says. “There’s a certain sense of responsibility. It’s about doing your job.”

DEEP SPRINGS COLLEGE was founded in 1917 bL. Nunn--a lawyer, inventor and educational innovator--as an experiment in higher educa tion.

Reared in Ohio and educated at German universities, Nunn made his fortune in mining and developing hydroelectric facilities throughout the West. In his 40s, he turned his attention to education, envisioning a college that would be a training ground for the nation’s leaders. He died in Los Angeles in 1925, just as his experiment was taking hold.

A professed elitist, Nunn wanted to isolate the brightest young men in America, encourage them to serve society and send them to the country’s most prestigious colleges.

“The purpose of Deep Springs,” Nunn wrote, “is to help in the training of the few.”

To this day, the college’s applications committee--eight students, a professor and the president--maintains a stringent screening process to ensure that Deep Springs winds up with only the most qualified young men. Of the thousands of students recruited every year, about 50 candidates get as far as the two-hour interview with the committee or an alumnus. And then, only 10 to 15 are accepted--depending on how many first-year students are invited to return. The college’s maximum enrollment is 26 students.

One late-winter evening, the committee is gathered in a classroom, waiting for a high school senior who has come by bus from Spokane, Wash. “The guy looks pretty nervous,” one student says. “He’s sitting straight up in a couch in the lounge reading a comic book.”

The 17-year-old has every reason to be nervous. Each of the committee members has pored over his nine application essays and seen his SAT scores and grades, which started strong but plunged in his senior year.

As soon as the applicant takes his seat, the committee fires away. One student inquires about the Greyhound ride. Another wants him to explain the drop in his grades. Yet another challenges him to justify his belief in God. At one point, amid a run-on sentence, he falls silent. “Could you remind me what the question was?” he asks. (Last month, the candidate received word that he didn’t make the cut.)

Nunn also intended Deep Springs to be a place in constant flux. “The only consistent residents of this place,” one student says, “are the dogs.” Students stay only for the two years of the program. Faculty members may remain no longer than five years. Even the presidency, customarily held by men either retired or on leave from their primary occupations, rotates about every three or four years.

Amid this change, it is up to the students to reinvent the place each year. For more than seven decades, they have remained loyal to Nunn’s founding principles and used his ideas as an anchor of continuity. Today’s students are no exception.

“They feel they’re part of a tradition,” says Tim Hunt, academic dean. “They read Nunn’s writing, and they feel they have some obligation to maintain the spirit of that.”

Students view Nunn with reverence and irony. They study and discuss his writings, which are published in a gray book visible on most dormitory shelves; some display his portrait prominently in their rooms. In conversation, they refer to him as “L. L.” This year, they even baked him a birthday cake.

In addition to his legacy of ideas, Nunn left the seed of the endowment that still provides nearly half of the college’s financing. Because no tuition is collected, the $600,000 annual operating budget comes from the endowment--now about $5 million--as well as ranch income, gifts from alumni and occasional grants. The Telluride Assn., a sister organization also founded by Nunn, provides financial support and runs summer co-ed programs for high school students at Deep Springs, Cornell University in New York and Williams College in Massachusetts. Some summer participants eventually attend Deep Springs.

Nunn is also responsible for the campus’s isolated location midway between Death Valley and Yosemite National Park. There, he purchased a cattle ranch and built a cluster of sturdy masonry buildings. Those same structures still stand in the circle of a dozen dormitories, classroom buildings and faculty homes corralled around the campus green.

In a letter to the students in 1923, he explained why he selected this site: “Great leaders from Moses to Roosevelt 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 the search for material things.”

IN A DORMITORY ROOM nicknamed the Black Hole--for its black walls--four students are doing their best to sort out Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” A family matter has forced their professor to be away for several days, but the history class proceeds as usual. The only difference is the move from the classroom to a dorm room.

Whatever else attracts students to the college, the institution’s primary function is education. Every class meeting, this one in particular, is a reminder of the students’ devotion to that cause.

As two students roll cigarettes of Drum tobacco, the group grapples with the text. Everyone has completed the reading assignment, and everyone seems genuinely excited about it. In the hourlong class, there are no lulls in the discussion, no awkward silences.

“They’re not all geniuses,” Michael Allen, the absent professor, says later. “We don’t have 25 Einsteins out here. But they’re very bright and motivated, and motivation is the big difference.”

Because Deep Springs students are not willing to merely sit and be lectured, instructors say, nearly all classes work as a discussion among the students, gently prodded by the professor. Tim Hunt’s literature course on the poets Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens is a good example.

Nine students sit around a table pondering a Jeffers poem. Seid, wearing the same jeans and T-shirt he wore to milk cows earlier, opens the class with an overview of the poem’s structure. Other students challenge him before he can finish. Hunt listens for 30 minutes before he breaks in. He gives a bit of background on the poem and the poet and asks a few questions of his own, and then the discussion continues.

Afterward, in his study, Hunt says that classes at the college aren’t the formless sessions one might expect at such an offbeat college. “Sometimes, people have the impression that this is an experimental college,” he says. “In an academic sense, it is not.”

In fact, students turn in papers, take exams and receive letter grades. But the institution has only two required academic subjects--composition and public speaking--among the eclectic mix of courses determined each term by the eight students who serve with Hunt on the curriculum committee. One term this spring, the 10 offerings included courses on world revolutions, linguistics, geology, calculus, radical ecology, chemistry and German.

Tom Hudgens, 20, a first-year student from Eugene, Ore., says the limited curriculum means that many students must put off some studies until after they leave Deep Springs.

“But then you hit on these whole other bodies of knowledge that you wouldn’t have otherwise heard of,” he says. “It’s a trade-off, but it’s a worthwhile one.”

Of the 10 students who left the college last year, two went to Yale, one to Harvard, one to Swarthmore, one to the University of Wisconsin, one to the University of Chicago and two to UC Berkeley. The others are taking time off from college.

Many alumni stay in education throughout their lives. A 1980 study conducted by an alumnus found that 54% had earned doctoral degrees and nearly 28% had chosen careers in academia. Others enter law, communications and government. Prominent alumni include Rep. Jim Olin (D-Va.); the late CBS News reporter Charles Collingwood; former U.N. Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel; former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Edwin Cronk; and former University of Rochester president Robert L. Sproull.

Whatever their ultimate paths, many students recall Deep Springs as the first place where their classmates and instructors measured up to their expectations.

“In high school, the whole way students approached their education didn’t interest me,” says Michael McGuire, 18, a first-year student from Houston. “Now I’m interested in education because I think it’s valuable in and of itself.”

FOR THE ADULTS who work at Deep Springs College, living in a world run by teen-agers takes some getting used to. Erik M. Pell, chairman of the college’s board of trustees, says that’s why the college presidents are usually alumni. It would be difficult to persuade anyone else to oversee a college without giving him the authority to run it, says Pell, himself an alumnus and a Xerox Corp. executive in Rochester, N.Y.

The president must balance student autonomy and the stability of the institution, Pell says. So the president is encouraged not to rule with an iron hand. Instead, he gently guides students toward decisions that are in the school’s best interests.

Buzz Anderson, who attended the college from 1939 to 1941, accepted the post for three years in 1987. A retired attorney from Pittsburgh, the 67-year-old says he has become accustomed to his job. “One reason I’m able to live with this sort of thing,” he says, “is that, by profession, I’m a lawyer, so I’m used to situations where you have to give a little ground here to take a little ground there.”

In addition to overseeing the college finances and serving on the applications committee, he supervises the 12-member paid staff, including the ranch manager, a mechanic and a couple who supervise farming.

The six-member faculty, however, falls under the jurisdiction of the college’s student-dominated curriculum committee. With Anderson, the group has the challenge of attracting high-quality professors to an institution unknown to many academics.

The committee draws candidates by advertising in education journals and attending academic conferences. Like student applicants, prospective instructors are required to visit the campus and meet with students. “We wouldn’t want someone who fits in here but doesn’t challenge the students,” says McGuire, a member of the curriculum committee. “But we wouldn’t want someone who challenges the students but doesn’t want to be all the way out here.”

Hunt says that professors who interview are always surprised to learn about the college. “They look at this place, and they find it either very appealing or appalling as far as the living situation goes,” he says.

But as for the academics, he says, the main attractions are the small class size, the quality and motivation of students and the intimate contact between teachers and students. “You are teaching students who actually want to be in your classroom.”

On the other hand, faculty members must make significant sacrifices. The institution offers no tenured positions, forcing instructors to fend for themselves once they leave Deep Springs. Faculty contracts are up for renewal annually. Professors are far from major libraries and research facilities. Pay is low--between $15,000 and $24,000 a year, plus room and board for the professor’s family.

Allen received his doctorate in history from the University of Washington. Like many liberal arts Ph.D.s, he took the first job he could get--a tenure-track position at a technical college in Tennessee, while his wife, Mary Hanneman, an East Asia history specialist, taught part time at Vanderbilt.

“Teaching at a state college can become very pedestrian,” he says. “A lot of people don’t want to be in there and consider you to be an obstacle on their way to getting a degree in business administration.” Frustrated by that attitude, the couple came to Deep Springs last fall. This spring, they joined forces to teach “Comparative Revolutions,” a history class.

Since the curriculum committee screens applicants so carefully to make sure professors fit in, only rarely have students recommended against renewing a faculty member’s contract. Still, the relationship can be awkward.

“It’s an interesting situation,” Allen says. “I suppose you worry about (the students) in the same way you would worry about your dean or your department chair in another situation.”

Professors say they are conscious of the potential conflict of interest but insist that it does not interfere with the way they deal with students, the way they grade or how they run their classes.

For their part, students say serving on the curriculum committee can be rewarding. “We shape the academic program,” McGuire says, “and that’s fulfilling.”

But when the committee recently recommended against renewing a professor’s contract, McGuire discovered how touchy hiring and firing one’s instructors can be. “I take that professor’s class, and I like him, and I sit down with him for meals,” he says. “And then I was part of the decision not to rehire him. That’s a delicate thing. It’s uncomfortable.”

ON WARM summer nights, Scott Fybush likes to wander out to California 168--the route that bisects Deep Springs Valley--and lie down in the middle of the road.

“I’ve been there for hours without a single car coming,” the 17-year-old first-year student says.

While Deep Springs’ demanding labor and academic programs can be heady new experiences, more sobering are the college’s remote location and the men-only campus. Those two factors are part of what draw people to the college and, occasionally, make them wonder why they came.

“I haven’t been particularly happy here,” Edelson says one night, leaning back in a chair and staring out his window into desert darkness. “There have been times when I’ve been very unhappy. But I don’t regret coming.”

The nearest town, Bishop, lies 42 miles down the road, and State 168 is among the least-traveled highways in California. The sense of separateness from civilization is reinforced by a rule known as the “isolation policy.” No student is allowed to leave the valley during the term without permission.

The location inspires Fybush’s antics and another student’s fondness for sprinting down the highway when cars pass--just to make the drivers wonder why anyone would be sprinting in the middle of nowhere.

There are no televisions on campus, and radio reception--except for a small station in Bishop--is full of static. The entire college shares one telephone line. At a college aspiring to train people to serve society, discussion of world events is oddly absent. No one mentions the Palestine Liberation Organization or “The Cosby Show” or the NCAA Final Four.

The seclusion frequently can become oppressive, making the small community especially insular and myopic. It may also account for the tendency of Deep Springs students to look and sound alike. “After a while, we start to pick up each other’s speech and idiosyncrasies,” Hudgens says. “It kind of can’t be helped.”

Nearly every student has long hair--the second-year students’ longer than the first-year students’--and most have grown beards. A surprisingly large proportion smoke hand-rolled cigarettes (alcohol and drugs are against the rules), and there is a conspicuous consistency in the type of music (Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead and reggae) that can be heard wafting from dorm rooms.

Because of the isolation, some second-year students say they gradually become bored with the monotony of valley life. “Every day’s the same,” says Michael Armstrong, 19, a former Deep Springs student-body president. “If a feed trough overflows, it’s an exciting day.” And then there’s the no-women policy. Nunn specified in the college’s trust that the institution was to educate “promising young men.” The college’s trustees have continued to exclude women, partly to maintain tradition and partly because they believe Deep Springs is so small that there is no room for what they think would be inevitable if women were on campus: romance.

“When you have 25 kids who can’t escape from each other and two get involved, those two involve 8% of the student body,” Anderson says.

In a straw poll, students have voted 18 years in a row to admit women, some students arguing that it is morally wrong to deny women the Deep Springs experience. The current students seem to accept the status quo without much argument, though, perhaps because the masculine atmosphere is part of the mystique that brought them here in the first place.

The all-male environment sometimes makes the dorms feel like locker rooms or Army barracks. Anderson refers to the students as “the guys.” And when a student plans to have a female friend visit--only with the permission of the student government--word gets around quickly. But the isolation from women seems to be more a fact of life than a source of aggravation.

In the end, being so far from women and the rest of the world seems to have had the effect Nunn intended. What most alumni wind up retaining from their experience at Deep Springs is a feeling of inspiration from the remoteness and uniqueness of the place. The men who look back at their years in the shadows of the Inyo Mountains don’t reminisce about a big game or a big party; they talk about “the valley”--as if those two words encompass the entirety of the experience.

“When you leave, not being in that place is a big change. It’s something that when you get away from it, it’s hard to have any perspective on it,” says David Schisgall, 21, now a junior at Harvard.

“Sometimes when I’m with Deep Springers in the outside world, I’m feeling very much like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got something that no one else does, and there’s no way outsiders are going to understand it.’ ”