One student said, “ ‘False dichotomy’ and ‘discourse’ are our favorite words.” Illustration by Barry Blitt

L.L. Nunn, at just over five feet, was several inches shorter than his hero, Napoleon. He had a shrill voice, a stiff-collared Victorian habit of dress, and an energetic manner, in spite of a persistent case of tuberculosis that frequently reduced him to less than a hundred pounds. A lifelong bachelor, Nunn started investing in Western mines in the late nineteenth century, and grew rich from hydroelectric power after he collaborated with George Westinghouse to perform early trials in alternating-current electricity. With his brother P.N., an engineer, he built the power station at Niagara Falls, Ontario. Though Nunn, who died in 1925, never graduated from college, he devoted the last two decades of his life to a novel form of education, an anomalous admixture of Christian mysticism, imperialist élitism, Boy Scout-like abstinence, and Progressive era learning-by-doing, with an emphasis on self-governance, leadership training, and the formation of strong character.

“I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform,” John Dewey wrote at the turn of the twentieth century. Nunn subscribed to that idea, and to the notion that schools should be laboratories of democracy. He railed against “the horrible mess which commercialism has made of so-called civilization,” and bemoaned “the bitter dissatisfaction which our educational system with its teaching that ‘All men are equal’ is plunging the nation into.” Nunn wished, he wrote, to train future leaders for a new society—“to do for a few boys what Edmund Burke’s tutor did for him.”

Nunn’s hopeful experiment, which led him to establish a scholarship house at Cornell, culminated in the founding, in 1917, of a small men’s school called Deep Springs College, on a working cattle ranch in the California high desert, not far from Death Valley. A student from the early twenties, interviewed for an oral history of the school, remembered the terrain as a “barren, treeless, rather Dante-like Inferno lying out there in the late afternoon sun.” Nunn wanted his students to form and govern their own ideal society, a project that he felt required their total attention: he limited enrollment to about twenty-five men, and, to discourage what he called “entangling alliances,” restricted contact with the residents of Bishop, a town forty miles away. According to Nunn’s biographer, Orville Sweeting, who died in 1976, leaving eighteen hundred pages in rough manuscript form, “L.L. said that Deep Springs Valley was selected for the express purpose of controlling by natural barriers a social condition which institutions all over the land control by regulations.”

The desert setting also lent a useful symbolism to the enterprise. “It is a fact of social evolution that spiritual leadership is the work of the few, ‘The Children of Light,’ ” Nunn wrote to the student body in 1924. “And the few have often come out of the wilderness—the eternal silence of the desert. When Jesus saw the vision of a blind and wandering people, he went apart to pray. ‘Come ye out from among them and be separate,’ and this is not to a fanatic life of asceticism but to a short season of preparation for the work of the few, the great work—the heavy toil of leadership.” When the students pestered or contradicted him, or merely asked to be reminded of what they were doing there, he shushed them, and told them to listen to the desert’s voice.

Deep Springs is five hours north of Los Angeles, on a route that skirts the Mojave and follows the line of the Sierra Nevada. The road goes through the Narrows—a one-way stretch between rocky scarps the color of baker’s chocolate—and passes the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest (the trees are the oldest on earth) before reaching the valley floor, where the campus sits at the end of a long alley of cottonwoods, locusts, and Chinese elms. (Until recently, when the bus company changed its schedule, most students arrived by bus from Las Vegas, and met a driver from Deep Springs at the Cottontail Ranch, a brothel on the Nevada side.) The buildings of the school are stolid prairie-style blocks, arranged in a tight inward-facing circle around a central green. The property, hemmed in by mountains, is fifty square miles. There are two basic rules: observe isolation, and abstain from alcohol and drugs while school is in session. End of term is another matter. Bryce Goodman, who arrived in 2004 and is therefore, according to school custom, a member of the Class of ’04, says, “I’ve heard the voice of the desert, but I was really drunk at the time.”

The school is year-round and free, and, in exchange for room, board, and tuition, requires its students to do several hours of manual labor a day. The cattle operation, supervised by a full-time, live-in ranch manager, Ken Mitchell, consists of three hundred cows, sold at market with a brand that looks like a pair of back-to-back “L”s. Two “dairy boys” milk at dawn and dusk, a “feed man” pitches hay and gathers eggs from a henhouse, two students tend the garden, four irrigate alfalfa fields, one butchers; others cook, clean, do office work, and serve as handymen. “I have a friend who ranches in the next valley,” Mitchell said. “He said, ‘You have a lot of help, dontcha?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if I had any more help I wouldn’t get anything done.’ ”

As a two-year institution, Deep Springs is technically a junior college, but its success in placing students at prestigious universities puts it in a category of its own. In recent years, about a fourth of each graduating class has transferred into the sophomore or junior class at Harvard, a fourth to the University of Chicago, and one or two students have gone to Oxford, Yale, and Brown. A term at Deep Springs is seven weeks, during which students are expected to take two or three courses. In Nunn’s time, the students read biographies of great men, and took public speaking and composition. (The latter two are still the only requirements.) These days, the coursework is more eclectic. A committee of students, along with a faculty member and the academic dean, hires teachers, based on their proposed syllabi—there are usually three long-term faculty, who can stay for up to six years, and three visiting instructors, who spend several months. Intellectual taste at Deep Springs is governed by a sophisticated attraction to foundational books and an adolescent admiration of the obscure. Uncanonical subjects, such as Lusophone language and culture, the writings of Ivan Illich, traditional breads of Europe and the Middle East, and auto mechanics, are offered alongside Shakespeare, Proust, Lévi-Strauss, and Marx. Philosophy is perennially in fashion. A student nicknamed Dasein, after a term in Heidegger, told me, “ ‘False dichotomy’ and ‘discourse’ are our favorite words.” Science and math tend to be far less popular. Peter Sherman, an ecologist who taught at the school until last spring, complained, “The students’ fascination with the abstract is very boring. But as soon as the abstract grows concrete they grow bored.”

There are two classrooms at Deep Springs, both of them in the main building, which is the largest on the circle. It is low, with a porch (two swings, Adirondack chairs, some discarded textbooks, and, always, a second-year man, smoking) and wide stone steps. Inside, there is a small bookstore—mostly, the students use Amazon—a modest library, and a dusty computer room, equipped with Internet service, which, like the phones, goes down in the high afternoon winds. The classes are all seminars, and usually have only four or five students. An exception, this spring, was an oversubscribed nine-person class on Emily Dickinson, taught by a thirty-one-year-old Harvard Ph.D. candidate named Katie Peterson. (The college, being outside the normal channels of academia, generally appeals to scholars either at the beginning or at the end of their careers.) In Peterson’s classroom, an oil painting of a cowboy hat sitting on a stack of schoolbooks decorated one wall, and there was a large conference table, covered in a fine layer of grit. As the students came in, a lanky first-year with shoulder-length dark hair stood at the blackboard writing out the poem that was to be discussed that day: