Intimate Elite College Combines the Ethereal With the Down-to-Earth : Education: Deep Springs gives students the chance to study Nietzsche in the morning and punch cows in the afternoon. The 26-student, all-male institution in California desert is debating whether to admit women.

By DEBORAH HASTINGS

Jan. 16, 1994 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

DEEP SPRINGS, Calif. — Smack in the middle of nowhere, just off a shimmering ribbon of desert highway north of Death Valley, sits one of academia’s best-kept secrets.

Isolation defines Deep Springs College. Isolation, and the unique opportunity to study Nietzsche in the morning and punch cows in the afternoon.

Few people have heard of this college and cattle ranch founded in 1917 by L. L. Nunn, an obscure electric power magnate. Dedicated to training a select few for lives of leadership and service, the institution has been quietly producing future ambassadors, politicians and college deans for the better part of eight decades.

Tuition, room and board are free. But to be admitted to this elite enclave between the Eastern Sierra and the Nevada border, students must be very smart. And they must be male.

Every Monday night, the 26 students at Deep Springs gather in the college’s ramshackle main building for public speaking, one of two required subjects (the other is composition) at the liberal arts institution.

On one recent night, the speech topics were race, class or gender.

The all-white, all-male, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class student body was representative of none of the subjects.

“Put the bleach down,” began Damon Rich, a student from St. Louis. “Who is a person without their skin?” he asked his audience, which included a lightly snoring dog. “Who is a person without their gender?”

Rich is criticizing political correctness. His college, founded three years before women in this country were allowed to vote, faces growing criticism for barring females.

The real topic of discussion at Deep Springs, one that affects its future and its funding, is whether this select clubhouse should accept women.

“I think we should go coed,” said Deep Springs President Sherwin Howard, who came here 16 months ago. “I arrived here thinking that, and I still do. But my thinking is more ambiguous now. It’s not so clear-cut.”

Howard is also concerned about this term’s all-white enrollment.

“Last year about a third of our students were minorities,” he said. “We need to work harder on that.”

Deep Springs was set up to be a utopian experiment in self-sufficiency, run by students who earn the nation’s top SAT scores. In exchange for their year-round education, students must work at least 20 hours a week on the 3,000-acre ranch, helping to care for cattle, chickens, pigs, horses and an organic vegetable garden.

The campus consists of 12 ranch-style buildings. The nearest outpost of civilization is Big Pine, a spit of a town 30 miles to the west.

There are two fundamental rules here: No drugs or alcohol and no leaving this desolate, breathtaking valley except during term breaks or with special permission.

Enrollment is limited to 26, and students stay for no longer than three years. They are expected to transfer to prestigious institutions such as Cornell, Harvard, Yale or the University of California at Berkeley.

To keep a permanent state of flux, faculty members may stay a maximum of six years, and the college president stays no more than three. Like the professors, presidents usually arrive on sabbatical from other universities.

Student committees do all work, including admissions, curriculum and reinvitation (students must be invited back for a second year).

Howard, on loan from Utah’s Weber State University, has begun a nationwide tour of Deep Springs alumni groups. Armed with a recently completed 64-page survey on the advantages and disadvantages of going coed, his mission is to find out how both scenarios would affect donations.

Started by an endowment from its founder that now totals about $4.5 million, Deep Springs operated last year on a budget of about $500,000. More than half that amount came from private contributions.

Some graduates and previous contributors now refuse to donate to an all-male college, Howard said. Others won’t give if women are admitted.

Howard said he hopes to resolve the issue, once and for all, during his three years here. The college’s Board of Trustees, which has voted down coeducation in the past, may vote again this year, Howard said.

The school’s survey of 350 former students, parents and others found that respondents were evenly divided on the issue of coeducation. So are the current student body and staff.

Office manager Iris Pope, who has worked at Deep Springs for 11 years, is vehemently opposed to coeducation.

“I’m a woman, and if it was discriminatory, don’t you think I’d say so?” said Pope, affectionately described by fellow staffers as never having felt an opinion she didn’t express.

“They can’t do the posturing they’d do if women were here,” she said. “They end up being better male communicators. This forces them to talk to each other. They learn to really deal with each other, without sexual pressure.

“People don’t have to come here. If you want the coeducational experience, go to the other 99% of colleges that are coed.”

Deep Springs is more a state of mind than an institution of higher learning. Nunn, who made his fortune by building the country’s first alternating-current power plant, intended it that way.

“The desert has a deep personality; it has a voice. Listen to the voice of the desert and you will receive from it enthusiasm and inspiration,” Nunn wrote in 1923.

He also envisioned his college as an oasis from an “evil system” corrupted by all manner of “material device and sensual pleasure.”

About 50 people live here, including students, male and female professors and ranch hands. All proclaim the college’s introspective isolation.

“I feel like I’ve become a substantially different person,” said 19-year-old Travis Beck, a second-year student from Denver.

“Before I came here I was on this naive and epic quest to understand all of life. I was a renaissance dork,” said the serious-minded young man who began his previous night’s speech by quoting Nietzsche’s preface to “The Birth of Tragedy.” “I think I’ve become much more relaxed.”

For fun, students like to shimmy naked down a nearby sand dune, or sleep outside under a blanket of stars, staring at the highly visible Milky Way.

Despite its isolation, life is full here. Work and schooling are undertaken with equal seriousness. If the dairy boy doesn’t milk the cows, there is no milk for breakfast. Public speaking and committee work produce endless hours of discussion and soul-searching.

There are rarely more than six students in a class; sometimes there are only two. The curriculum changes with each term. The current course list includes anthropology, American pragmatism, ecological physiology and an independent study class in German translations of Nietzsche.

Bret Logue, 18, arrived here in June from Waterford, N.J., knowing little about horses and less about cows. Logue read about Deep Springs in “one of those college books” and applied.

It was the opportunity to be a cowboy of sorts, and to work a ranch, that lured him. “The uniqueness of an experience like this, 26 people, all men, in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “I probably will never experience life on a ranch anywhere else.”

Among the college’s most distinguished graduates are former Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Olin of Virginia, former University of Rochester President Robert L. Sproull, writer William Vollman and former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore Edwin Cronk.

Olin, who retired in January after 10 years in public office, calls his three years at Deep Springs “tremendous” and a major factor in his choice to become a politician.

Now 73, he entered Deep Springs in 1938 and became student body president. “I got the biggest kick out of the fact that the students had a lot of authority,” he said. “That leadership experience was a very strong factor in later life.

“I also was very much influenced by the debates that we used to have with each other, the intimate, very deep conversations that we would have with other fellas.”

Olin is active in fund raising for the college, and has slowly begun to think that barring women is no longer a good thing.

“It really raises the question of whether we’re training these students in the right way to become leaders,” he said. “My youngest daughter went to Dartmouth, and she got elected to an honor society where she lived in the same house with men. Used the same bathroom. She got along fine.”

Even Logue, who was drawn to Deep Springs because of its all-male student body, now second-guesses himself.

“When I came here, I was very strongly in favor of it remaining all male,” he said. “But I don’t really think it’s fair for all the females who could come here and have a great experience.”