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.