Headline, June28, 2013

'''A UNIQUE COLLEGE'''

As Josh Hudelson prepares to leave Deep Springs College and head to Columbia University as an anthropology major, there are a few things he is taking caring of.......among them, slaughtering a cow and spending the night with the corpse in a 40 degree meat locker.

A golden boy, you might think at very first glance, the kind who'd make any mother proud. But he is also, he admits a tad possessed, driven by passions most Ivy-League-bound 19 year old from upstate New York would not be able to wrap their heads around. At first, it was Socialism, and now, after two years at Deep Springs, the Campus of which is a 2,500 acre ranch 35 miles from Death Valley, it appears to be dead animals.

Hudelson might seem like an oddball, but Lucien Lucius Nunn, the eccentric electric-power magnate who founded Deep Springs in 1917, would have considered him a ''future world leader'', which he believed could be anyone from a great preacher to a civic-minded carpenter. Nunn considered the material world an ''evil system,'' rife with ''sensual pleasure'' such as 'girls' and 'kid excitement,'  and felt that the masses, ''dull witted, sluggish and incapable,'' needed leadership from an elite few.

With that in mind, Nunn set up his Utopia in an uninhabited desert valley, a mile up in the White Mountains on the California -Nevada border, where the climate vacillates between-bone dry and arctic. The desert floor is perfectly flat. At its edges, the mountains  -dappled with sage and loose rocks  -rise up like 3,000 foot fortress walls. It's a landscape intended, one senses  for existential thought.

Nunn's 26 students were forbidden to leave the valley or take drugs or alcohol. Beyond that, all other decisions would be left to them. They would given the power over admissions, discipline, and the hiring and firing of the faculty. Tuition would be free. The students who attend for two years, would support themselves by working on the College's cattle ranch and by doing the administrative and maintenance tasks of the college themselves.

By all rights it should have ended as a cult or mass murder  -Lord of the Flies came to Life. Indeed, as Isaac Ericson, the 20-year old head of admissions reports, ''I keep getting e-mail from parents wanting assurance that this isn't some cult.'' Instead, as other Utopias founded at the same time have withered and died, Deep Springs, while it seems to perpetually teeter on the brink of implosion and even lunacy, has become ''the most successful experiment in higher education in U.S. history.

Deep Springers  -and there only 13 a class, at one time included an ambassador to the United Nations William J Vanden Heuvel, later the co-chairman of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute; famed CBS newsman Charles Collingwood; Virginia Congressman Jim Olin; top Internet entrepreneur and on and on.

Roughly 80 percent go on as juniors to colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell and Oxford, while the remaining typically embark on a year of service first. For the first time in three years, 

a Deep Springer has won a Truman Scholarship, a highly prestigious fellowship for students embarking on careers in public service.

With the rare exception, only students who score in the top 1 percentile on the S.A.T's have a shot at getting in. They write nine essays, the equivalent basically, of an average high-schooler's entire output for a year. A typical essay might be a 30 page paean Ayn Rand or a hermeneutic analysis of Where the Wild Things Are.

Applicants sit before a committee of nine 19-year olds who, after asking about books and goals, might throw out, ''If a shark and a polar bear got into a fight in a neutral ''jelly like'' medium, who would win and why?'' Naturally, most high-school seniors have better things to do than go about such vigorous journeying for the privilege of two years and celibacy, dish washing and animal blood. But then there is the tiny reminder who think. This place sounds so damn crazy it might just be for the best of you!!

The tiny size and the isolation and the power of this ideal, that you are given something truly unusual........That's just too compelling an idea!!

Respectful dedication to the Desert Frat and with a deep appreciation for the outstanding work and knowledge they are doing and gaining in Field Studies.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless