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My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

harrisonbarnes.com

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Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#31

Post by 23kfuhfsdf »

brindlejim wrote: post #28
interiorchurch wrote: post #18

Question: TASP, a related summer program, has recently gone through some painful convolutions related to race and inequality[1]. How much if at all has Deep Springs been affected by currents like this? [1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-c...

TASP was renamed TASS a couple years ago, and it now offers only two seminars: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. The program has been taken over by woke radicals both on its board and in the administration, which is led by Amina Omari, someone with near-zero experience in education prior to her appointment. I receive desperate emails from them asking for volunteers and financial support, which sugge…

TASP -- Sad to hear!

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#32

Post by brindlejim »

knodi123 wrote: post #24
aaronharnly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I visited a friend who was attending Deep Springs back in 1995 or 1996, when we were both first-year students. Because I was too young to rent a car, I had to take a bus out of Las Vegas, and get picked up by someone from Deep Springs coming over the pass in a pickup. This is the Lida Junction mentioned in the article. Very memorably, the "bus stop" was just an intersection with a dirt road, with (1) a phone booth (2…

> Very memorably, the "bus stop" was just an intersection with a dirt road, with (1) a phone booth (2) a brothel. They mentioned that in the article a couple of times. I wonder if it's still that way? Sometimes Vegas seems like a different country.

The brothel (The Cotton Tail Ranch) closed many years ago.

Another neat thing about the "bus stop" was that the phone booth gave you no way to dial. There was no number pad. You'd pick it up, and the call would go straight to the operator, because neither she nor you actually knew what was going on. That is, the phone was a very old one, built for a system that relied on operators to "put you through". I remember calling the school to tell them I had arrived, and having to wait for the operator to find the right instructions in the manual to do that. Even then, there were only a few of those phones left in the US.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#33

Post by ipython »

Does the image https://d18pp9dg727fce.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/200... from the article load for anyone? For me, from multiple browsers, it shows as a very broken JPG that's clearly had a few bit flips and as a result is just blocky garbage on my browsers. Curious if this is bitrot from AWS or what.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#34

Post by dsctaway1234 »

interiorchurch wrote: post #18

Question: TASP, a related summer program, has recently gone through some painful convolutions related to race and inequality[1]. How much if at all has Deep Springs been affected by currents like this? [1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-c...

These conversations have been live on campus for some time (80s) and continue. Though we're isolated, most conversations happening elsewhere also happen here, but, because everyone's so weird, the conversations get turned on their head or don't present in the same way in other places. Mostly it just makes the environment less reactionary.

That can be frustrating for some who want change now, but, at the end of the day, the students and community have the power to change most aspects of the program, and year to year different students or community members take on different projects in response to community needs. That agency helps diffuse many convolutions via compromise and practical action. Of course, convolutions still happen. Basically, this isn't a place that avoids conflict or disagreement, it's a container where students (and staff, ha!) learn how to disagree, conflict, resolve/forget, and get shit done.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#35

Post by dsctaway1234 »

JackFr wrote: post #27
dsctaway1234 wrote: post #13

Current resident of deep springs college, happy to answer any questions.

Wouldn't it be easier to fly into Reno, NV and take the bus to Bishop, CA?

The bus only goes to Beatty these days, so most people fly to Reno, LA, or Bishop.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#37

Post by giraffe_lady »

teachrdan wrote: post #15
every wrote: post #12

Blackburn College is also a work college and was established in 1837. My dad was an alumnus back in the Great Depression. It was all he could afford... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn_College_(Illinois)

Berea College is similar. I met a super smart student from there years ago. Interestingly, they were also early pioneers in being co-ed and racially integrated. "Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky. Founded in 1855, Berea College was the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. It was integrated from as early as 1866 until 1904, and a…

Some of the most interesting people I've ever met had gone to berea. One notable example was when I met him working as a farrier but had a MM piano performance from berklee and had published papers in a CS journal. Another was a chef, would give me a six stone handicap in go (I was playing 1-2 kyu at the time) and then tear me apart in between heroic bong rips. These just not common combinations of skill and interest at all.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#38

Post by warner25 »

dsctaway1234 wrote: post #20
warner25 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. As I read this, I was mostly wondering about how much time the students were spending on the admissions process for new students. This guy was just one applicant, and he spent a whole week there by himself, and all of the students reportedly spent time dissecting and discussing his 50+ pages of essays and participating in his four-hour interview. How does that scale? It seems like this would be an all-co…

The application committee is a group of about 10 students and 2-4 staff and faculty. By the time of the interview, everyone will have read all parts of the applicants materials. Close reading and critique still characterizes much of the interview. But in my experience, someone can have major mistakes in the essays/tests/transcript and be admitted. Sometimes the application is deeply rooted in a specific intellectual…

So if only 10 students are on this committee[1], that makes more sense. Either this has changed since the time of the author's story, or he misremembered, or exaggerated (re: saying that all 25 students, the whole student body at the time, was at his interview plus talking about his essays for days leading up to his interview). I understand that the idea isn't meant to scale up to larger schools, but it sounded like it wouldn't even scale to the number of applications that Deep Springs would get in any given year.

[1] Is this still 1/3 to 1/2 of the student body?

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#39

Post by AtlasBarfed »

THE LESSON

You should neither trust outward appearances, nor let them intimidate you. There is always a discord between the appearance that a person or organization projects, and their actual nature. For this reason, always be careful about the people and organizations in whom you place your trust.

.....

About Harrison Barnes

Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.

.....

Also, guy is excessively obsessed with people's personal sex lives, and seems to try to match people to caricatures and archetypes. He seems to have problems appreciating complexity and things that aren't white and black.

A lot of extremely smart people are like this with social aspects, because they become entrenched in proof/disproof and absolute right and wrong points from excessive academic achievement.

No wonder the guy a) was fascinated with an extreme cult college where extreme academics with poor social skills seem to go, and b) is obsessed with Las Vegas.

I recall reading a Catcher in the Rye which is popular precisely because of stunted/novice social development narrative perspective (protaganist is a teenager) identifying everyone as "phonies". Same vibe here.

Re: My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)

#40

Post by refulgentis »

girzel wrote: post #29
vonnik wrote: post #25

I attended DS in the mid-90s, slightly before @girzel (who does great work btw!). DS is essentially a transfer school that offers no tenure and whose small student body is on a two-year program. That is a recipe for rapid cultural change and little institutional memory inside the valley. Which is to say, Harrison got a snapshot of a very peculiar place, which is now peculiar in very different ways. The school went co…

Hi Chris! I also felt like the essay suffered a lot from generalization -- Harrison happened to talk to these three people, and extrapolated way too much from that.

Well, no, at the minimum he talked to all 25 students.[^1]

Additionally, why would 1, 3, or 25 matter?

The behavior Chris described requires attending the school and visiting it often enough to view multiple cohorts.

[^1] When I went into the classroom at the appointed hour, the 25 students were all there ready to interview me.

[^2] Man, I wish I went there if it means you could talk like this all the time. The older I get, the more suffocated I am by the damp blanket of adult communication. At 20 I would have said it was immoral and boring to withhold engaging deeply, at 35 I need a damn good reason to bother engaging rather than smiling and nodding.

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