Deep Springs College, World Wildlife Fund, and More

A Long Delayed Update

Aug 16, 2023

A brief update after one year running Operations at Deep Springs College, a funny college in the Eastern Sierra.

The view from my front porch on August 1.

I haven’t sent along a post in a long while — I’ve been busy!

A little over a year ago, I accepted a position at Deep Springs College, a two year liberal arts college and working ranch in the White Mountains, about an hour from Bishop, California.

I don’t remember how I originally heard about Deep Springs. If you’re into experiential education and a big enough nerd, someone eventually tells you about it.

Founded in 1917 by electrical pioneer, L.L. Nunn, Deep Springs accepts ~14 students per year who, in exchange for a full-ride scholarship:

Work their butts off in a rigorous liberal arts fundamentals program
Work at least 20 hours on the 130,000 acre ranch, 150 acre farm, 2 acre market garden, and campus
Self-govern many aspects of the college, e.g. admissions and curriculum selection

It’s kind of hard to describe how it all works together and the feeling of my place in the middle of it all. There is an emergent quality to how everything get done, especially as half the student body turns over each year. The institutional knowledge embodied and passed down from class to class is one of the most remarkable things about the college.

They teach each other how to evaluate and admit some of the brightest and most alternatively-minded college-aged people in the country (and beyond).

They participate and lead wide ranging, unconventional seminars on Arendt, Weil, Wittengenstein, Ancient Astronomy, Linear Algebra, or Painting.

They learn the practical ins-and-outs of scratching a living in the rapidly-changing high desert, working on what our colleagues at the USFS and BLM call the most responsibly-managed cattle herd that they know.

They run into the rough edges of living in community with so much distributed responsibility: the obligations, the breakdowns, the joys, the work.

And honestly they do a lot more than that. They do so much, so earnestly that they would be rightly disappointed by the romantic and simplistic picture that I’m drawing.

After graduating, most students transfer to four-year institutions to finish their bachelor’s degrees. Some go to work regenerative agriculture. Some stay for the summer to live at a high camp in the White Mountains managing the cattle. One dropped out and went back to Ukraine to work as a journalist. Many go on much later to work in academia, still chasing threads they first caught around the dinner table as students.

All continue to question how and whether they are living a life of service to humanity.

This 60 minutes segment helps describe the experience.

I feel lucky to support their work with a talented team of staff, faculty, and visiting professors.

I also feel lucky to live in a world where more people are seeing the value of this education, taking up Nunn’s vision of 100 years ago — Tidelines Institute, Outer Coast College, Thoreau College, Gull Island Project.