Cattle, Dostoevsky and Desert Isolation

Last week I went on a fund raising trip for Deep Springs College, a school I attended for two years starting at age 17. Now I'm on the board of directors.

Deep Springs is a college and a ranch. It has 27 students, 300 cows, and 120,000 acres of grazing land in the high desert east of the Sierras, on the boarder between Nevada and California. Deep Springs is a study in contrasts. The college is surrounded by lushly irrigated alfalfa fields in an otherwise empty desert valley of sage brush and sand. When you drive across Gilbert Pass into Deep Springs Valley, all you see of the college is a small smudge of green in the distance.

In the mornings students attend class, and in the afternoons students work the ranch. Another contrast: reading Dostoevsky then shoveling manure or pulling a breech birth calf from a heifer.

Deep Springs is also an experiment in student self government. Every year a committee of students selects the incoming students for the following year. Students also hire and fire the faculty. In both cases the college president has a veto, but that is very rarely used.

The stark isolation of the desert fosters a strong community. If you leave campus, you can walk for days without seeing another person. I once backpacked alone and saw no one for a week. (After four or five days of solitude, you begin to hear voices in the wind when it rustles the sage.) The isolation all around pushes in on the community to make it more intense. Fifty people – including students, faculty and ranch staff – share meals at the boarding house and rely on each other for everything. Interdependence. If I don't milk the cows, the rest of the community has no milk. If I leave the wrong gate open, a cow eats fresh alfalfa and dies of bloat. In a small group, no one can hide, everyone matters.

Deep Springs molded me more than any other experience growing up. Sometimes I wonder whether my aspirations for NetApp's culture are an attempt to recreate the feeling of community I loved at Deep Springs.