My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)
harrisonbarnes.com
harrisonbarnes.com
It sounds like this guy visited during a "mean" period, which is too bad. I attended during an upswing into a "nice" period, and it felt well balanced. My application interview was one of the most memorable experiences of my life -- I'd never had anyone pay that kind of close attention to anything I'd written, or what I thought. It woke me all the way up, in a sense where I'd gone through most of my teenage years asleep, and was enormously bracing. When they finally let me out, I emerged into the main room, where some guy reading on a sofa looked up and asked, "How was it?" I don't remember exactly what I said, but it communicated something along the lines of "holy shit that was a thrill!". I still suspect he communicated my attitude back to the applications committee and that played a part in getting accepted.
So far as I know, no one during my two years visited the Cottontail Ranch :)
DS is essentially a transfer school that offers no tenure and whose small student body is on a two-year program. That is a recipe for rapid cultural change and little institutional memory inside the valley. Which is to say, Harrison got a snapshot of a very peculiar place, which is now peculiar in very different ways.
The school went co-ed a few years ago (it had spent the previous century as an all-male school). That brought a sea change.
Harrison is correct, I suppose, to say that every institution is deeply human and no one should be intimidated by them. But he is wrong to extrapolate too much about DS based on his visit there.
Even people who spent years of their lives there would have trouble generalizing about it in ways that accurately encompass decades.
If I could try to generalize about DS, I would say: it has traditionally been a place where excellent weirdos learn and work together, and which puts tremendous pressure on them, for good and bad. I have not experienced a more intense or sincere learning environment before or since.
I also felt like the essay suffered a lot from generalization -- Harrison happened to talk to these three people, and extrapolated way too much from that.
Additionally, why would 1, 3, or 25 matter?
The behavior Chris described requires attending the school and visiting it often enough to view multiple cohorts.
[^1] When I went into the classroom at the appointed hour, the 25 students were all there ready to interview me.
[^2] Man, I wish I went there if it means you could talk like this all the time. The older I get, the more suffocated I am by the damp blanket of adult communication. At 20 I would have said it was immoral and boring to withhold engaging deeply, at 35 I need a damn good reason to bother engaging rather than smiling and nodding.
Instead of offering a traditional undergraduate program that teaches largely from modern textbooks, students work through what the institution calls a “Great Books” curriculum of the “foundational texts of Western civilization” across a variety of subjects: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
I have, however, read some accounts online that the program has flaws with the way it teaches mathematics, where some students claim that an approach through historical texts is less effective than one with more current books. In any case, I think it’s interesting that non-traditional institutions with largely respected reputations exist, like St. John’s and the colleges in the article and the discussion so far.
Most people that are frustrated by one of the two things I mentioned above, either experience a shift in perspective, or do not complete their studies at St. John's.
Afaik they have been trying to fudge these numbers over the past few years because admin thinks it makes the school look bad, but fewer than 50% of freshman that enroll in the college will graduate. And at least a third of those that leave don't make it past the first semester.
[1] Just to paint a few broad strokes of the highlights of our math program: Freshman study Euclid's Elements and Optics, Archimedes, and Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest, Sophomores study Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler's Astronomia Nova, and Apollonius' Conics. Junior's study Newton, Maxwell, Oresme, Leibniz, Pascal, Descartes, and Dedekind. And Senior's work through Einstein, Lorentz, and Minkowski's relativity papers, before rounding the whole thing off with Lobochevsky, Bertrand Russell, and Gödel.
Looks kind of pretty though. Like a blocky sunset.
This guy was just one applicant, and he spent a whole week there by himself, and all of the students reportedly spent time dissecting and discussing his 50+ pages of essays and participating in his four-hour interview. How does that scale? It seems like this would be an all-consuming thing for a whole admissions cycle. Does the whole academic program just revolve around these essays? Or are the assigned essay topics directly related to what the students are studying?
Like other comments here and on the OP have said, Deep Springs has many different cultural moments because of the short turn over of the students in their elected positions (and as residents), the 2 year or so retention rate for staff, and new visiting professors 4 times a year.
To your question of scale -- the college is actively against scaling. The founder hoped the school would inspire similar schools. And over the last decade or so, Outer Coast College, Tidelines Institute, Thoreau College, and Gull Island Project have all started programs based on Deep Springs. They're all coming out to the college next weekend for a summit.
Because students are constantly balancing too-much work between academics, labor, or self-governance, each year, the application committee finds a new stable point of work load each year. Based on my experience, if the students only had to work on the application committee, their first impulse would be to spend more time on it. The stakes are higher for them than it is for us, since, as the OP notes, the student body retains the authority to regulate the conduct of its members.
The academic program is relatively conventional, i.e. 4-10 person seminars with most students taking 2-4 per semester or term. The difference is the collective striving for great academic performance (written and spoken in seminar) and the ability for professors (long-term and visiting) to pitch courses they wouldn't be able to teach elsewhere (for any reason, e.g. politics, student quality, etc.).
These days, class is in the morning, labor in the afternoon, governance as schedules allow (though there are two regular meetings each week, committee meetings, such as applications, and the student body meeting). There is also a long-standing public speaking class each week during sept.-may; students give speeches on common prompts or speak on something important for the life of the community.
[1] Is this still 1/3 to 1/2 of the student body?
I agree with the other commenter here that the students probably didn't think, "this 18 y/o applicant's theories are ground breaking!!!" They probably thought, "what a crazy (but well written) essay, we gotta talk to this guy." Not clear to me if that essay was also the Jungian essay he talks about in the interview, but that gives a good indication of how students tend to approach interview questions about essays and following up on responses.
But yes, the current set up has just over a third of the student body serving on the application committee and only the application committee interviews the applicants. The student body still collectively interviews any long-term staff and faculty; one of the highlights of my time at deep springs (even if it was before I began).
One of the more interesting things about Deep Springs is that the students are definitely counter cultural but also very competitive and generally academically (or at least intellectually) straight-laced/standouts. That's the zone of genius they were in before they came here, so afterwards, they go to schools you'd expect them to go. Until the 1960s, many (most?) students went to Cornell to the Telluride house (also founded by Nunn) to finish their undergrad.
What they do next is usually more interesting. When accepting the scholarship to attend deep springs, students agree to commit themselves to a life of service to humanity. At the founding, becoming a titan of industry (emulating the founder) was definitely seen as such, but, as you can imagine, ideas have shifted with generations. Pursuing advanced degrees is pretty popular, and many alums have gone on to work in higher education.
When I was getting driven in by a student for my interview as a staff member, they asked me why I wanted to work there. After I gave some answer, I asked her why she decided to study at deep springs. She told me that of her options (including top US schools), deep springs seemed to be the hardest and the only place where she would get real feedback. After listening to her answer and talking to her about it, I decided I wanted to work at deep springs because I prefer to work with that quality of student, and, if I can work with 24 or so, even better.
These guys all come in very talented academically and in some cases professionally, and, for my money, the education that they get -- especially in politics and common sense -- helps round them in a way which is very rare in other colleges or learning communities. That high-minded conversations flow from the seminar to the ditch digging crew is why I would suggest a place like deep springs (or something like the Thiel Fellowship) versus reading lots of books in your spare time and working on a farm if you are a bright but disenchanted student.
Cons are a lifestyle which is very much out of sync with the rest of the world and expectations. Any resident is committing to live in a small village (mostly 18-24 y/os, usually <10 staff and faculty) on the northern boundary of death valley.
And if you're a student, you are committing to participate in a democratic game in which your peers (and yourself) will regulate your actions, e.g. no wifi on personal devices, only shared desktop computers. But as you can imagine, it's hard to get such regulations passed.
Depending on how you cope, the entire project might be a con, ha! That is, the program demands nearly all of the time of a student for 2 years. For some, that is too much of a burden. But for many it's their first introduction to working that hard that continuously. After their time, most deep springers would be great high-potential, low-experience start up employees, for example.
An easy way of thinking about deep springs today is that it's a modern seminary or monastery.
I like working on projects like deep springs because the marriage of mind and body. It has been rare for me to find good concentrations of folks who want to physically work until they're exhausted and who are also incredibly curious (and rigorous in their curiosity) about the world.
"Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky. Founded in 1855, Berea College was the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. It was integrated from as early as 1866 until 1904, and again after 1954... As a work college, Berea has a student work program in which all students work on campus 10 or more hours per week."
[1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-c...
That can be frustrating for some who want change now, but, at the end of the day, the students and community have the power to change most aspects of the program, and year to year different students or community members take on different projects in response to community needs. That agency helps diffuse many convolutions via compromise and practical action. Of course, convolutions still happen. Basically, this isn't a place that avoids conflict or disagreement, it's a container where students (and staff, ha!) learn how to disagree, conflict, resolve/forget, and get shit done.
Once US News started more heavily weighting 4-year completion rates, schools responded by attempting to select for folks who would complete in 4 years and providing more support for first and second year students. That left fewer spots for transfer into upper-level classes because of fewer dropouts / transfers-out.
Like I commented elsewhere, most students until the 60s went to Cornell to the Telluride house. That relationship was very helpful for generations of students. Deep springers still do follow this path, but much more rarely, i.e. every few years someone will go.
The stories from the modern era about a quarter or more of the class going to Harvard of UChicago are mostly gone now, although every so often an admissions director starts trying to get as many dsers as they can -- looking at you Columbia ;) But basically, top schools seem to accept about one deep springs student a year as part of their upper-level transfer class. For example, this year, harvard accepted just 14 students for upper-level transfer, including one deep springer.
So things seem to be getting harder, but the student experience here is so unique and the student quality so excellent, that they're still able gain admission to top schools despite the changing landscape (most of them get into one or more of these schools before they attend deep springs).
There has been some conversation as this has been taking place about new arrangements or additional support (e.g. 4 year scholarships, a formal relationship with another school, etc.), but at the moment, the need isn't acute enough, though vision for this aspect of the experience will be included in the next strategic plan.
Generally, the quality and curiosity of life on the ground here is what attracts great and weird students to enroll rather than a pipeline effect; applicants attached to that don't tend to make it into final class.
Deep Springs is on a different track, but not a totally dissimilar one. That is, the school has been attempting to feminize for decades, a process that culminated in its conversion to co-education in 2018 after a long legal battle. I get the school's newsletters and see occasional land acknowledgements penned by privileged people of color, which tracks with a known trend in US liberal arts colleges.
But the real shift at DS, triggered by co-education, seems to be that it's less hard-core. One person called it "Benningtonization". The boys and girls all hive off into pairs, and the communal life of mind and labor and governance shrinks as it cedes ground to America's default version of life together, the romantic couple.
But the school has gone through many phases. This is no doubt a temporary one.
"My visit to Deep Springs College taught me, in no uncertain terms, to be extremely careful about trusting anyone. Whether it is trusting a leader, trusting the numbers an institution claims, or trusting someone who is making an argument to you about this or that. A substantial majority of the people, institutions, and others we encounter in our day-to-day lives are completely full of shit. Everything is a facade and you really do not know what is real and what is not."
Because I was too young to rent a car, I had to take a bus out of Las Vegas, and get picked up by someone from Deep Springs coming over the pass in a pickup. This is the Lida Junction mentioned in the article.
Very memorably, the "bus stop" was just an intersection with a dirt road, with (1) a phone booth (2) a brothel.
They mentioned that in the article a couple of times. I wonder if it's still that way? Sometimes Vegas seems like a different country.
Another neat thing about the "bus stop" was that the phone booth gave you no way to dial. There was no number pad. You'd pick it up, and the call would go straight to the operator, because neither she nor you actually knew what was going on. That is, the phone was a very old one, built for a system that relied on operators to "put you through". I remember calling the school to tell them I had arrived, and having to wait for the operator to find the right instructions in the manual to do that. Even then, there were only a few of those phones left in the US.
There is of course an interesting history about this road: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd499744....
Yes, they are brilliant.
Yes, they are hilariously weird and counter-cultural.
The college is absolutely gorgeous. I would cherish the opportunity to go again.
Imagine someone went to Harvard, you'd expect that they have a classic high paying industry job.
But instead they are a farmer.
Or it's standard in the culture to be married, but the vast majority of Deep Springers are not.
I agree countercultural is overly vague. At the same time, its hard for the mainstream culture to understand what they take for granted until they come across people who are explicitly unaffected by it.
Actually the one Harvard Law grad I know draws anime porn.
> “Have you ever actually read any books by Carl Jung?” one of the students asked me.
> “No, I’ve never read a single thing by him,” I answered truthfully.
> “Then how can you possibly have a large quote from him in your essay, base an essay around his teachings and also lead us to believe that you know what you are talking about?”
> It was a really good question and he had a point. The rest of the experience and all of the questions went basically like this: I would say one thing and they would contradict me and accuse me of not really understanding what I was talking about.
This is a big paradox of modern society: most of what people believe is bullshit.
But you can’t go around saying people believe bullshit, because they are people, and worthy of respect.
The best solution is to focus on contributing new knowledge, not destroying the bullshit.
It would have been much more impressive if a student actually addressed the ideas attributed to Jung, or explained why the quote was misleading.
I can't remember whether there was much debate about this breaking the isolation policy, but there was practical opposition: DSC only had a single telephone line at the time, and my desire to be online drew consternation from the office manager, who sometimes needed to make calls.
Be who you are, or who you want to be. Do not trust the images of conformity around you, for they wear a mask more often than not.
Raise your own awareness - something often lacking our everyday experiences, for all of us.
Deep Springs gives the 24 2-year students all the responsibility: to pick faculty and students, to actually run the ranch, and to govern themselves.
Part of that is ensuring each generation of students decides for themselves: practices survive only if the current generation adopts them.
Another part is that people commit to taking you seriously; i.e., you will be held responsible for your bullshit (er: taken at your word), e.g., "the people who read this essay at the school thought my idea was groundbreaking" means "The most interesting thing was this essay, so they went with it."
Another part is the "isolation" policy: students don't leave during term, and more generally avoid outside influences (the internet has been a big issue, obviously). The goal is for you, together only with the people you have with you, to take full responsibility, and gain full authority, using what you have at hand.
As a consequence, outside interest is Deep Springs, while necessary for the validation to recruit good students, is mostly discouraged -- to avoid influencing how the current students decide how to run things, and certainly to avoid visitors or internet conflagrations.
It's extremely rare for students to have this combination of freedom and responsibility and feedback. It should be replicated. It's almost always life-changing. So if you know any brilliant, caring, and productive people about to start college, please ask them to consider Deep Springs.
Otherwise, please forget about it :)
36 years and 18 student generations; author visited in 1988.
> Another part is the "isolation" policy: students don't leave during term, and more generally avoid outside influences (the internet has been a big issue, obviously). The goal is for you, together only with the people you have with you, to take full responsibility, and gain full authority, using what you have at hand.
Sounds like a cult.
Yes, "freedom" is a strange word to describe a place where students have so much control over others -- whether they can visit their girlfriends or not. It does sound rather cultish.
Some anecdotes:
The application process was intense. I wrote 4 essays for the first round, then four more for the second (and an extra one at the college), plus several other smaller prompts and questions. Each essay was 2-3 pages. The essay topics weren't easy either: "In what ways do your actions escape the boundaries of your intentions?" was one I remember in particular. They were enjoyable prompts, just difficult, but I think I did fairly well with them.
They paid for my flights. It was the first time I had ever flown.
At the airport I chatted with the other nervous applicants. We took a long, winding bus ride into Bishop. The driver took a good look at us and said "Ah, must be that time of year again" when we all climbed aboard. We were dropped off at a Walmart parking lot, and got picked up a couple hours later by a student in a large white pickup truck.
The sun had set, so we couldn't see anything. We drove through a very narrow pass carved through some mountains, you could see the layers of rock in the truck's headlights. The student honked three times since it was only one car wide. When we arrived we were directed to a dusty attic to drop off our things, and then told to be ready to work at 6am. We all split up and wandered around aimlessly. The attic had a calendar with cowboy pinups on the wall, and was filled with musty old magazines and random bits and bobs. I loved their music room, with hundreds of old records and CDs and cassettes, as well as the smoking porch, which they endearingly called the "Smo'po' ". I was slightly surprised that so many students smoked. The conversations they had were interesting and rich. There was no small talk, only waxing poetic with a pack of marlboros. I wandered into the dining hall where students were cleaning up dinner. The kitchen was loud, two giant amps spewed Taylor Swift while somebody sprayed off plates with an industrial(?) washer.
In the morning, I learned how to milk cows with another applicant, a girl who talked about Aristotle the whole time (just to impress the students, I think). Two buckets later and we watched the sun rise over the ranch. Again, we arrived in the dark, so this was the first time I was seeing everything. It was brilliant, like nectar pouring over the mountain sides. The whole valley opened up, much larger than I expected, almost swallowing me whole. The campus itself, just a handful of buildings, was now a small speck in the distance.
I did very poorly in the interview. In the application they ask you to list every book you've read in the last year, and whether it was for class or personal enjoyment. I did dual enrollment and was about to receive my Associates in highschool, and pretty much only took math classes (I wanted to be/currently am an OR scientist), and I never read much outside of my lit classes. They asked why, claiming that reading was a particularly important skill for this school. I gave a mild response, but said that recently I had started reading a lot more, and pulled out a copy of Tristram Shandy. The president of the college was one of my interviewers, and his eyes lit up. He asked me why I was interested in the book, and I said something along the lines of "I heard it was incredibly boring." His face immediately turned sour, and said "Well, it's also incredibly funny." What I really meant was that it's about the monotony of everyday life, which seemed interesting given that most books I enjoyed were fantasy and sci-fi. But I was fairly nervous and starstruck at the moment, and didn't express myself very well. I never finished the book.
Later in the day I helped a student load hay bales into a truck and distribute them around to various stables and pens. I had an interesting conversation him. He said that the biggest reason he came to Deep Springs was because he wanted to escape his drug and alcohol use. He was lean and tan, with short black hair, and wore a grimy white t-shirt and jeans. He was the "gopher hunter" (though I think it had a more prestigious name), and told me all about the ins and outs of the art of gopher hunting.
During lunch I spoke with several other students. One, from India and had attended a famous international school (whose name I unfortunately don't remember, but apparently has had many alumni attend Deep Springs), was the most well-spoken person I've ever met. Everything he said was eloquent and precise, in a way I can't quite describe. He somehow chose the optimal words for every sentence, leaving his audience with no room (or need) for interpretation, you simply understood exactly what he meant in an unsettling vivid way. I wish I could remember something that he said. After lunch, I sat in on a philosophy class. They were discussing an Ayn Rand text they had read the previous week. I tried to ask questions and participate, though not having read the text made it difficult. If only it was a diffeq class!
The next day I went on a hike with another applicant into the mountains. He was Bulgarian, with a thick beard and a puffy sweater, and spoke with a heavy accent. We made lots of jokes and talked a lot about what we'd imagine life would be like here.
When I got back, I wrote another essay, though I don't remember the exact topic. A student brought me up to a nearby house on a hill, and gave me a printed prompt and several sheets of paper and a pen. I asked what this building was for, as it was rather empty, just a table and a few beds. He said that sometimes students sleep in this house, and I asked why. He had slept there last night, because he was sick. I said I hope he's feeling better, to with he replied "Yes, though it was more of an emotional sickness than physical one." I didn't ask any other questions, though I wish I did.
We all took another winding bus ride through the mountains back to the airport, though we were rather silent this time. I flew back out and eagerly awaited to hear back from them. It was my first choice for school. I was crestfallen when I got rejected, and heavily considered reapplying next year. But the application process was so long and intense, and I was so busy with applying for internships and completing upper level courses, I couldn't muster the energy to do it. I regret it less each year.
You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.
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About Harrison Barnes
Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.
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Also, guy is excessively obsessed with people's personal sex lives, and seems to try to match people to caricatures and archetypes. He seems to have problems appreciating complexity and things that aren't white and black.
A lot of extremely smart people are like this with social aspects, because they become entrenched in proof/disproof and absolute right and wrong points from excessive academic achievement.
No wonder the guy a) was fascinated with an extreme cult college where extreme academics with poor social skills seem to go, and b) is obsessed with Las Vegas.
I recall reading a Catcher in the Rye which is popular precisely because of stunted/novice social development narrative perspective (protaganist is a teenager) identifying everyone as "phonies". Same vibe here.
I figured the story would take a dark turn, like a horror flick.
Au contraire! This is a story about a bunch of self righteous pricks whose peckers get antibiotic resistant STDs.
This was great, thank you. (The moral lesson is interesting too but I don't want to spoil it)