THE SEARCHERS.(Lucien Lucius Nunn)(Biography)

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 elitism, 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 ...