Here I possessed nothing in the world. I was no more than a mortal, strayed between sand and stars, conscious of the single blessing of breathing. And yet I discovered myself filled with dreams.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Students write seven essays to apply, need SAT scores approaching the top 1% of students, and attend a lengthy interview before they may be accepted. There’s a total enrolment of around 26 students – 13 per year – who are all male (a long contentious element of the college that is logical considering the nature of its founding in 1917, but that is debated every year by the students and faculty)
Students take a variety of classes including composition, public speaking, as well as an eclectic mix of humanities, science and there seems to be a particularly strong emphasis on classic literature (try a few thousand pages of the likes of Proust, Heidegger and Derrida each semester). As well as their classes, each student chooses a labour role each semester, ranging from cook or gardener to mechanic, farmhand or cowboy – and works around 20 hours a week contributing to the small and mostly self-sufficient community. Finally, the students run the university themselves through their student body, debating issues and having meetings every week, determining curriculum, staff, rules and new admissions.
I’ve recently become kind of preoccupied with Deep Springs College, an unconventional American university situated in an isolated desert environment. Absent-mindedly flicking through an old Vanity Fair magazine from last year, I found a fascinating article about the college that drew me in, and once I was done I found their website and read everything there, late into the night.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for the last three days; it’s really causing me to ponder deep and hard about where I’m going with my life in the next few years, and I’ve surprised myself with the strength of my own response to the idea of attending Deep Springs. The university was founded in 1917 with the core principles of intense academic study, hard labour/service to society, and a self-governing student body. These are all tied together by the intense focus that isolation in the natural envirionement can bring, since the institution is located on a ranch and farm in a remote and dramatic landscape in Inyo County, California.
Picture milking cows at 5am or working in the field, eating the morning’s fresh produce for breakfast at 7:30, philosophy and literature classes all morning, lunch cooked by your fellow student cooks, more farm work all afternoon, a nap or maybe a walk in the desert before a hearty dinner, then maybe study in the small library, a student meeting, poetry reading or public speaking gathering, before some all important sleep in the dorm before another day begins.
There’s something about this mix of elements that sounds incredibly transformative and important to me – extremely challenging intellectual stimulation, extremely hard work on a farm, a small and close community in the wildness of isolation (students are strongly discouraged from leaving or having visitors), its strong history, and finally its deep-rooted principles: the importance of service to humanity and the universe, the discipline of hard work, the nourishment of learning and wondering about our world, all strengthened by the solitude and power of a wild natural environment that allows an escape from “the midst of uproar and strife for material things” (DS founder L.L. Nunn).
I’ve been staring off into space at work these last few days, thinking about this place and wrapping my head around why I want to go there and just what is it that draws me to the experience. Read more about it here, at the Deep Springs official site, or read their Winter ‘05 Alumni Newsletter here. The wheel-line image is kindly supplied by Rob Monk here.
Discussion