Back from the Ranch

“Whatever you do, don’t describe us as ‘cowboy intellectuals’,” Nick L. Tsang ’07 says. “Don’t make us sound weird.”

In his tweed blazer and intellectual glasses, the Deep Springs alum looks about as far from a cowboy as one can get.

Tsang made the transition from the two-year college in the California high desert to Cambridge two years ago, and he’s one of roughly 10 students, eight undergrad and two in grad school, who have made that move and now study at Harvard.

A student’s departure from an isolated cattle ranch and alfalfa farm near Death Valley, Calif., to an urban campus is, by definition, radical.

But what specifically characterizes the transition to Harvard (other than the shock of street music versus lowing cows, and riding the T in lieu of tractors)? According to transfers, it is a movement marked by a sense of loss of a community, social alienation, and anonymity—no surprise for students leaving a close-knit school of 25 students.

“They have very few problems with transferring or being admitted,” Deep Springs President F. Ross Peterson writes in an e-mail (in keeping with the rustic theme, the college’s phones were down at press time). “Their biggest problem after transferring is trying to get involved and not become a number.”

But for some, anonymity can be a positive thing.

“I was looking forward to being just another cog in the machine,” Tsang says.

BAN THE INTERNET

Deep Springs is an two-year all-male liberal arts college guided by the precepts of “academics, labor, and self-governance,” according to the school’s Web site. Given its rigorous application process of seven essays plus a four-day visit and interview, each entering class consists of only 12 men. There are four to six professors in residence who teach classes of approximately four students each. Pupils hire and fire their own faculty and work 20 hours a week at jobs ranging from working cattle to cooking food for the group.

Basically, they run the place.

No idea they have to improve their school is too far-fetched. Example: A guy campaigning for head of the technology committee one year ran on the platform that he wanted to get rid of as much technology as possible, according to Tsang.

But cutting off technology is just one example of Deep Springs’ attempts to isolate itself. Strict rules and long academic terms prevent students from leaving for much of the year, and the campus is surrounded by desert on all sides.

Though there’s no formal relationship, a significant proportion of each Deep Springs class leaves the desert Harvard-bound. “Over the years, the Transfer Admissions Committee has seen many superb applicants from Deep Springs and has admitted a fair number of those candidates,” E. Marlene V. Rotner, a Harvard senior admissions officer, wrote in an e-mail.

Kids who attend Deep Springs were usually Harvard material while in high school. Students from the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP), a competitive program for gifted high school juniors, often continue at Deep Springs and colleges like Harvard—there are at least seven TASP alums in Harvard’s 2010 class. TASP was founded in 1911 by Ohio-born electrical entrepreneur L.L. Nunn. He would found Deep Springs in 1917.

Despite the top-notch quality of its students, Deep Springs’ community has critics. Over the past two years, Deep Springs has received an influx of media coverage with prominent articles in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Both articles tout the cowboy-intellectual aspect of the college, and students say in doing so the articles missed the meaningfulness of Deep Springs.

The Sept. 4 New Yorker article raised the question of class at the college, suggesting that the school consists of primarily white, upper-middle-class boys. According to Rosenblum, the school pulls primarily from the East and West Coasts as well as from urban centers.

One feeder school is Groton School, a Massachusetts prep school.

“It makes talented people (for whom success has probably been quite easy) struggle,” Craig Gemmell, associate director of college counseling at Groton School, writes in an e-mail.

Although Deep Springs charges no tuition fees, the school faces losing outstanding applicants to other top institutions that guarantee a financially-needy applicant four years of financial aid, as opposed to Deep Springs’ two. For some students, two years in the desert isn’t worth the perceived risk.

There is no Deep Springs equivalent for women, and according to Vanity Fair’s June 2004 piece, the place of women can be awkward. The article emphasized the sexual tension inherent in an environment of empowered young men, making much of allegations that female teachers have had trysts with students in the past.

'A CERTAIN KIND OF RICHNESS'

“At the end of the day, it’s just 26 guys in the middle of the desert,” says Noah A. Rosenblum ’07, who graduated from Deep Springs in 2005.

“That community can’t be conceived of in a society like Harvard. I’m in a class with people for seven weeks—I don’t know their names,” Rosenblum says.

“Community” is a liberally used term. Rosenblum, a resident of Pforzheimer House, argues that you can’t truly understand communal life until you’re inextricably bound up in it.

He added that Harvard is a place “where everyone’s throwing around the term community, but where there is none of that.”

Tsang viewed the issue of community slightly more mildly. “A sense of intellectual community is ready-made at Deep Springs. You have to work for it here,” he says.

The pursuit of community led Jody S. Morita ’06-’07 to transfer to the Dudley Co-op. Morita, who graduated from Deep Springs in 2003, lived in Quincy House for one semester but promptly put himself on the wait list for the alternative residential option. He was admitted in his second semester. The Dudley Co-op, with its communal meals and intimate style of living, has proved a welcoming home for a number of Deep Spring alums over the years. Alex J. Rothman ’07, another Deep Springs alum, also lives in the Co-op.

At Deep Springs, Morita washed dishes and delivered calves. At Quincy, Dorm Crew swept after him and Harvard University Dining Services cooked his dinner. Morita felt “anonymous being in a house.”

“It was an institutional way of living and social in a lot of ways I didn’t like,” Morita says.

Morita’s sense of anonymity is not only a factor in a transfer’s residential life, but in his social interactions throughout the College as well.

Rothman found the experience of transferring to Harvard from Deep Springs socially alienating.

“I came here hoping to put Deep Springs behind me,” he says. It wasn’t easy.

“After two years of such isolation, you’re not used to meeting new people, particularly not used to hanging out with girls,” Rothman admits. “The culture of materialism that exists at Harvard was definitely alienating.”

Rothman was unpleasantly surprised to find the presence of Final Clubs culture and i-banking recruiting, considering their proliferation an expression of deeper issues at Harvard.

Despite the New Yorker’s suggestions of Deep Springs’ socioeconomic makeup, Rothman says, “Harvard is stratified in terms of class. There are no class issues at Deep Springs.”

Coming from a place where being completely alone is an impossibility (even if you avoid your classmates, there are always the cows), Morita found a silver lining in being one in the crowd at Harvard.

“Lecture courses are kind of incredible,” Morita says. After four-person classes at Deep Springs, the large courses some undergraduates groan about are “jarring but pleasurable” experiences.

“I am far more academically fulfilled at Harvard than I was at Deep Springs,” he says.

Harvard’s limitless resources and diversity of thought contribute to this fulfillment, and other alums echo his sentiments.

“There’s no good way to study science at Deep Springs,” says Tsang, a history and science concentrator.

While Rothman found the tiny, intimate community at Deep Springs to be so insular that it was at times oppressive, it is precisely that closeness that Rosenblum struggles to articulate, concluding that its spirit is something an outsider just can’t understand.

Though their shared experience gives the transfers a sense of fraternity when they come to Harvard, most branch out on their own. They do not always socialize together. They take different classes. They lead separate lives.

But when they see each other in the Yard, they perceive silently in one another what Morita calls an “overwhelming sense of ethical purpose.” That purpose was instilled in them at Deep Springs, but is harder to come by at Harvard.

“The way that Deep Springs conceives of an education and the way that Harvard conceives of an education are two very different things,” Rosenblum says. He begins sentence after sentence, trying to conjure the words to explain Deep Springs to someone he believes will never get it.

Finally, he hesitates and says, “You are sensitized to a certain kind of richness.”