Deep Springs College is now coed

[struggle4progress]

Last edited Fri Jul 20, 2018, 02:00 AM - Edit history (1)

The grapevine says Deep Springs College, all male for over a century, finally, this month, has its first coeds on campus -- and I predict we will see some kick-ass students from there

Where the Boys Are

... Deep Springs is one of America’s smallest, most unusual and most elite colleges. It accepts no more than 26 students at a time, who live, work and study together deep in the California desert on a property that stretches 50 square miles. The young men spend two years “in the valley” and go on to finish their degrees at the nation’s most exclusive colleges, about a fourth of them at Harvard. At Deep Springs, in exchange for free tuition, the students work 20 to 30 hours a week doing manual labor, herding livestock on the college’s cattle ranch, milking cows in the dairy, tending to the crops that will be their food, and doing dishes and maintenance. There are technically no adults in charge—the students govern themselves, meeting as a parliamentary group called the Student Body to discipline one another for infractions. They also hire and fire all the faculty and decide which students get accepted ...

Put twenty-five 18- and 19-year-old boys deep in the desert, tell them they’re special and give them the responsibility to run their own school? It sounds like a reality show, which is to say, a recipe for disaster, and at times Deep Springs resembles Lord of the Flies. Arguments, whether over cleaning the dairy or the meaning of Nietzsche, get intense. The machinations and debates at Student Body meetings can make an Obamacare town hall look measured and sedate. Over the years, at least one student has managed to run himself over with a truck; another briefly poisoned the water supply with a sheep carcass — drenched in his own urine — while attempting to make leather the Neanderthal way; and there has been one accidental death. Still, 100 years after its founding, the experiment is going strong, with such notable alumni as novelist William T. Vollmann; James Withrow, a leader of the World War II–era precursor agency to the CIA; Chris Nicholson, CEO of Skymind, an artificial intelligence company in San Francisco; and Norton Dodge, an expert on Soviet economics, who, through smuggling, single-handedly saved underground Russian art from total oblivion during the Cold War. There are also two MacArthur “genius” grant recipients, a congressman, and a guy who attempted to be a real-life masked vigilante in Roanoke, Virginia. This from a collective group of alumni that is, in total, smaller than a single class of freshmen at Harvard.

All these illustrious graduates are men, because for its first 100 years Deep Springs did not admit women ...

The school for cowboys gets ready for cowgirls

... Deep Springs has survived and thrived in the middle of nowhere to claim its title as one of the world's most remarkable liberal arts colleges. Students spend two years studying an eclectic curriculum that includes ancient Greek, genetics, biology, music, philosophy, political science, mathematics, literature and international relations. There is no television, no mobile phone reception and limited internet access.

Tuition and board are free – each student receives a scholarship valued at about $50,000 – making this a cashless campus and one of a handful of free colleges in the US; rare, endangered islets amid a rising tide of fees, debts and drop-out rates. Endowments pay for half the $1.6m annual running cost; the rest comes through fundraising.

Students, however, must spend at least 20 hours a week doing "labour" to keep the college-cum-ranch ticking over: cooking, cleaning, gardening, milking cows, saddling horses, herding cattle, moving hay, butchering chickens, wiring cables, sorting library books, fixing vehicles. On top of this, they must administer college affairs: debating and voting on things such as amending the curriculum, hiring staff, sifting applications for next year's intake, deterring coyotes (shoot them, according to a recent decision), expanding or restricting internet access, vetting visitor requests ...

CA Appeals Court OKs College’s Wish to Go Coed

... The Fourth Appellate District unanimously ruled that Deep Springs College trustees have the right to include women in its small, highly selective student body, despite a sentence in the trust left by founder L.L. Nunn that says the college is “for the education of promising young men” ... The issue was raised in the 1950s, seriously considered by trustees in the 1960s, 1970s, mid-1990s and from 2003 to 2005. After 60 years of considering the issue, the board voted in 2011 to go coed ... The case .. revolved around a matter of law regarding how and when a trust may be altered ...

My Dream College Won't Accept Me Because I'm a Woman

"Isolated," "labor-intensive," and "rural" are not typical keywords for a high school girl's college dream. But they were for mine. With a student body of 26 and an emphasis on manual labor, Deep Springs was unlike any college I had heard of. Students enroll for two years and receive full-tuition scholarships, then transfer to a four-year college program to complete their degrees. Admissions are extremely competitive—accepted students have an average score of 700 (out of 800) on each of the math and verbal sections of the SAT. Located in California's High Desert, the school has a cattle ranch and an alfalfa farm, where students are not only obligated to their education but also to the demands of the agriculture around them. Deep Springs emphasizes self-governance; students belong to committees to make important decisions about the school, from hiring new teachers to soliciting media attention. The school uses these three pillars of education—physical labor, immersive academics, and democratic deliberation—to fulfill its purpose of creating students who dedicate their lives to service of humanity.

But there's one more thing. Since its founding in 1917, Deep Springs has been an all-male institution. A couple years ago, as I enviously clicked through the Deep Springs website, the opportunity to attend was not open to me. Little did I know, at the same time, the Board of Trustees had entered a process to challenge the all-male tradition. In the fall of 2011, they announced at their bi-annual meeting that they had come to the monumental decision to open their doors (or more likely, their gates) to female applicants. In what seemed like fate calling out to me, the first class of women would enter in 2013, the year I graduate from high school ...

When the board made their decision on co-education in late 2011, they voted ten to two. The two trustees who voted against the decision were alumni of the school who believed the importance of remaining in the bounds of the trust—which states that Deep Spring's purpose is to educate young men.

My initial reaction to finding out I couldn't apply to Deep Springs was anger. These trustees nullified the application that I had spent hours crafting because of an archaic sentence which pertained to "the education of promising young men." In the fall, I had been given the chance to apply to my dream school, and just a few months later, these trustees took that away from me suddenly, and in my opinion, unfairly. I was hurt ...

[Princess Turandot]

1. The Atlantic link needs a small correction..

there's a stray </b> tag in it, right after '2013/01'

[struggle4progress]

2. Fixed! Thanks!