Court: Deep Springs Can Admit Women (17 April 2017)

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By Scott Jaschik

A California appeals court ruled 3 to 0 .. that Deep Springs College, the smallest college in the United States and one of the most rigorous, may admit women.

The board of Deep Springs voted in 2011 to end its policy of admitting only men. But litigation from some alumni opposed to admitting women has held up the admission of women -- even as the student body, faculty members and many alumni have strongly backed the switch ...

The alumni who challenged coeducation have argued that L. L. Nunn, the industrialist and educational thinker who founded Deep Springs in 1917, wanted to educate only men. And there are references in the trust documents to a mission of educating men ...

But the college's leaders have argued that the unique style of education is the true mission of the college, not educating only men ...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/17/california-appeals-court-rules-deep-springs-college-may-admit-women

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1. Scenes From an Unusual College in the High Desert (8 June 2017)

Mike McPhate
CALIFORNIA TODAY



... Sam Contis, an Oakland-based photographer, began visiting the campus in 2013 and was struck by the intimacy of the community.

"It's a place that feels very open," she said. "The young men I photographed have an incredibly expansive perspective of what masculinity can be" ...

In 1994, the college’s board voted against a proposal to go coed. Then, revisiting the matter in 2011, it went the other way, voting 10-2 to make the change. The transition has been tied up in litigation ever since.

Supporters of the move, including many of the current students, argue that times have changed and so should the college. Others have expressed concerns about disrupting a formula that they saw unique and liberating ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/us/california-today-deep-springs-college.html

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2. Deep Springs Getting Close to Coeducation (29 June 2017)

By Scott Jaschik

... The California Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a ruling by a three-judge panel on a lower court that the college had the legal right to admit women.

As is frequently the case when supreme courts decline to hear an appeal, there was no written explanation. But that leaves in place the unanimous April appeals court ruling on the issue.

The key finding of the appeals court was that the lower court had been within its discretion to approve a change in the trust guidelines for the college from promoting "the education of promising young men" to "the education of promising young people." There was no evidence, the appeals court said, that the lower court had exceeded its authority to determine which trust provisions were "administrative" (such as the reference to men) and which ones were focused on the central mission of the college (the overall approach).

The lower court also noted arguments that admitting women would help Deep Springs advance its mission in that some prospective students and faculty members (male and female alike) won't consider a single-sex institution ...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/06/29/california-supreme-court-rejects-appeal-ruling-permits-deep-springs-admit-women

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3. Deep Springs, One of the Last All-Male Colleges, Goes Co-Ed (30 August 2017)

by SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

... The two-year college receives 180 to 250 applications a year for about a dozen spots in the 30-student body. Each receives a full scholarship valued at $50,000. The three pillars of its curriculum are academics, labor and self-governance.

Isolated on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in the high desert of California, just north of Death Valley, Deep Springs was founded in 1917 by Lucien Lucius Nunn, an electricity magnate. He had a clear idea of how young men should be educated: to serve humanity.

Students are expected to spend 20 hours a week tending the farm, raising chickens and milking cows. They also cook, clean and maintain community vehicles and have a strong voice in the overall running of the college, which operates year round.

Only three non-religious, private, four-year men’s colleges remain in the country — Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Morehouse College in Atlanta and Wabash College in Indiana ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/deep-springs-one-last-all-male-colleges-goes-co-ed-n797061

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4. Deep Springs Board votes to admit women (1 September 2017)

The board of Deep Springs College voted Thursday to admit women to the all-male college, starting with the class that will enter the college in the fall of 2018. The board took a similar vote in 2011, but in the years since it has been fighting off litigation from some alumni opposed to coeducation. In June, when the California Supreme Court rejected the latest appeal, the road to coeducation was cleared. Students and faculty members have been pushing the college for years to admit women. Deep Springs, in the high desert of California, offers two years of instruction, with full scholarships, and has an enrollment of 26. Many of its graduates go on to some of the most competitive colleges in the country. The students govern many functions of the college, including its working ranch ...

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/09/01/deep-springs-board-votes-admit-women

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5. Shifting perspectives on masculinity in Sam Contis Deep Springs

... The book opens with a small picture of a triangular-shaped crevice in a rock face, echoed in a photograph of Deep Springs Valley torn out of a scrapbook made a century before. In between, barely registered, a student wrestles with cattle, obscured by a cloud of dust. The book continues with a large plate across the fold capturing the desolate dust bowl, breaking into a succession of views, printed big and small, that navigate the students’ habitat, moving between tender details and gestures, and wide, snow-capped expanse ...

http://www.bjp-online.com/2017/10/shifting-perspectives-on-masculinity-in-sam-contis-deep-springs/#closeContactFormCust00

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6. Deep Springs by Sam Contis

... With an academic curriculum that covers everything from political theory, ethics, philosophy, sociology, economics, literature, gender studies, natural and physical sciences and more, students are expected to read a wide range of authors from Plato, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Heidegger to Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Joan Didion and Judith Butler. And alongside their coursework, all the students engage in at least 20 hours of manual labour each week, maintaining the general campus and its facilities, supporting the college’s 155-acre alfalfa farm or working on its ranch, which has more than 200 head of beef cattle.

“People often refer to the young men there as ‘cowboy scholars’,” the artist Sam Contis observes, “but their experience is so much more varied than that simple description suggests.” While pursuing her MFA at Yale University, Contis learnt of Deep Springs through her fellow students, several of whom had previously studied there. When she settled in California in 2012, she decided to visit the college and explore it more thoroughly. Over the course of the past four years, she has regularly travelled to Deep Springs, photographing its students, its landscape and its culture from an intriguing and complex perspective ...

https://www.ft.com/content/a2f1e4c8-33b5-11e7-99bd-13beb0903fa3

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7. Deep Springs Now Accepting Applications from Women (1 September 2017)

The board of Deep Springs College voted August 31, 2017 to open applications to women for the 2018 entering class. The board adopted the recommendation of the college’s Coeducation Transition Committee, which read: "Having reviewed the preparation needs for admitting women in the summer of 2018, the planning structure, agenda, and the institutional resources in place to address them, the transition committee recommends to the Board of Deep Springs College that the college welcome applications from all promising young people for the incoming class of 2018."

Deep Springs has operated for a century with an all-male student body; this vote culminates a process begun by the Board’s 2011 resolution that having "carefully considered the purpose of Deep Springs, how best to achieve the purpose, and changes in society since the college was created, the trustees determine that it is appropriate to plan and implement a transition to a coeducational student body" ...

https://www.deepsprings.edu/coeducation-news/