Cowboy Scholars; Imagine an academically elite college whose 26 male students work a 2,500-acre cattle ranch, aren't allowed to drink, do drugs, or leave their isolated desert valley, but control admissions, discipline, and faculty hiring and firing.

BYLINE: Evgenia Peretz

As Josh Hudelson prepares to leave Deep Springs College and head to Columbia University as an anthropology major, there are a few things he is taking care of-among them, slaughtering a cow and spending the night with the corpse in a 40-degree meat locker. "I was worried it was airtight and I was going to suffocate, so I had people check on me throughout the night," he says cheerily. "It was kind of enjoyable." Good-looking and fit, Josh is a young man of supreme confidence, able to play the guitar and sing out, campfire-style, unembarrassed. A golden boy, you might think at first glance, the kind who'd make any mother proud. But he is also, he admits, a tad possessed, driven by passions most Ivy League-bound 19-year-old guys from upstate New York would not be able to wrap their heads around. At first, it was socialism, and now, after two years at Deep Springs, the campus of which is a 2,500-acre ranch 35 miles from Death Valley, it appears to be dead animals. In addition to sleeping with the slaughtered, frozen cows, he has been tanning sheepskin, for what purpose he doesn't know yet. But there are scraps of sheep flesh lying all over the living quarters and in the shower, the way most college dorm rooms are littered with pizza crusts. "This place smells because I've got some rotting materials," he says, breezing through the dorm. He has no plans to clean it up.

Hudelson might seem like an oddball, but Lucien Lucius Nunn, the eccentric electric-power magnate who founded Deep Springs in 1917, would have considered him a future world leader, which he believed could be anyone from a great preacher to a civic-minded carpenter. Nunn considered the material world "an evil system," rife with "sensual pleasure," such as "girls" and "kid excitement," and felt that the masses, "dull-witted, sluggish, [and] incapable," needed leadership from an elite few. These few, like Jesus, Moses, and Theodore Roosevelt before them, would be able to hear "the voice of the desert."

With that in mind, Nunn set up his Utopia in an uninhabited desert valley, a mile up in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border, where the climate vacillates between bone-dry scorching and arctic. The desert floor is perfectly flat. At its edges, the mountains-dappled with sage and loose rocks-rise up like 3,000-foot fortress walls. It's a landscape intended, one senses, for existential thought. The nearest "towns" are an hour away-Big Pine, California, population 1,350, and Lida Junction, Nevada, whose only permanent inhabitants live in a brothel.

Nunn's 26 select students were forbidden to leave the valley or take drugs or alcohol. Beyond that, all other decisions would be left to them. They would be given the power over admissions, discipline, and the hiring and firing of faculty. Tuition would be free. The students, who attend for two years, would support themselves by working on the college's cattle ranch and by doing the administrative and maintenance tasks of the college themselves.

By all rights it should have ended in a sex cult or mass murder-Lord of the Flies come to life. Indeed, as Isaac Ericson, the 20-year-old head of admissions, reports, "I keep getting e-mails from parents wanting assurance that this isn't some cult." Instead, as other Utopias founded at the same time have withered and died, Deep Springs, while it seems perpetually to teeter on the brink of implosion and sometimes even lunacy, has become the most successful experiment in higher education in U.S. history. Deep Springers-and there are only 13 a class-include ambassador to the United Nations William J. vanden Heuvel, now the co-chairman of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute; famed CBS newsman Charles Collingwood; Virginia congressman Jim Olin; top Internet entrepreneurs; edgy novelists William Vollmann and Peter Rock; Tim Oslovich, a Lutheran pastor to native Alaskans; and Norton Dodge, an economist who through spycraft and smuggling single-handedly saved underground Russian art from total oblivion during the Cold War. Roughly 80 percent go on as juniors to colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, and Oxford, while the remainder typically embark on a year of service first. For the fifth time in three years, a Deep Springer has won a Truman scholarship, a highly prestigious fellowship for students embarking on careers in public service.

With the rare exception, only students who score in the top 1 percentile on the S.A.T.'s have a shot at getting in. They write nine essays, the equivalent, basically, of an average high-schooler's entire output for a year. (A typical "essay" might be a 30-page paean to Ayn Rand or a hermeneutic analysis of Where the Wild Things Are.) Applicants sit before a committee of nine 19-year-olds who, after asking about books and goals, might throw out, "If a shark and a polar bear got into a fight in a neutral, jellylike medium, who would win and why?" Naturally, most high-school seniors have better things to do than go about such vigorous mental journeying for the privilege of two years of celibacy, dishwashing, and animal blood. But then there is the tiny remainder who think, This place sounds so fucking crazy it just might be ...