t three in the morning, Hannah W. Duane ’26 sat in a truck in the freezing California desert, reading Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and waiting for a calf to be born.

“All of the pieces in my life were fitting together, even as they were sort of absurd in their unity,” Duane recalls of the moment.

She recounts this to me over Zoom from England, where she’s now studying at the University of Oxford. But just four years (and a Harvard education) ago, Duane was living in an isolated California valley, pouring over philosophy, keeping watch over calving cows, and helping run her own college. Duane speaks of it with a fondness that has survived the intervening years, a familiarity with the people and customs of the place that recalls the way one might speak of a former home.

That college was Deep Springs, a two-year institution offering an unconventional vision of the liberal arts. With only around 26 students enrolled at a time, the institution is both remarkably small and unusually ambitious in its conception of education. Under the tenets of academics, labor, and self-governance, students spend their mornings in seminars and their afternoons tending gardens, repairing machinery, or working on the ranch, though some rise earlier to milk cows or prepare breakfast. Beyond these duties, students exercise considerable authority over the institution itself: they select incoming classes of students, participate in hiring faculty, and serve on committees for everything from college policy to communication with the press.

For Duane, these seemingly disparate pillars were bound together by a common purpose. “It was an attempt to get me to pay more attention to the world and to the people around me,” she says, adding that the collective work of a seminar was “not so dissimilar” to tending the ranch or deciding who should be admitted to the college.

The lessons many Deep Springs graduates like Duane take from their desert sojourns endure beyond the valley, bleeding into their academic pursuits and becoming part of, in some senses, a way of life. Of Deep Springs students entering between 2016 and 2023 who subsequently enrolled elsewhere, roughly half went on to Ivy League universities and similarly selective institutions. There, they enter an educational milieu of specialization and pre-professional priorities that can feel divorced from the localized intimacy and collective obligations of the desert. Yet in the union of these two worlds, alumni discover new possibilities for learning, reconciling the freedom to pursue their own intellectual interests with an attentiveness to the people and places beyond themselves.

For Ethan J. Liao ’28, the marriage of intellectual inquiry and practical experience found unlikely expression in the company of cattle. At Deep Springs, Liao spent several summers working as a cowboy, learning, among other things, that even shallow streams could bring a herd of cows to a standstill.

“The actual way the cow thinks, it doesn’t really see the stream as something to cross,” Liao says. “That’s just a separate space to it.”

These encounters required him to set aside his own assumptions and attend to the peculiarities of another creature’s understanding. The principle extended to the classroom, where reading Derrida, Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” or Shakespeare’s “King Lear” similarly required him to “learn the ways that they were thinking and the contours of their argument” instead of trying to impose his own. In self-governance, too, persuading a peer often meant understanding their reasoning before attempting to change their mind.

At Deep Springs, these attempts at understanding were a necessary part of living alongside one another, with all the difficulties that entailed. Duane remembers the closeness fondly, though not without qualification. Community, she tells me, “makes claims on you.” It asks for your time and attention even when you would prefer to spend them elsewhere; at times, there is little opportunity to disappear into one’s private concerns without someone noticing.

Yet if the intimacy of Deep Springs made it difficult to escape the demands of others, Harvard presented an almost opposite difficulty.

For Sofia E. Mikulasek ’27, arriving at Harvard from the desert was disorienting. During her first months, she would walk through Harvard Yard and repeatedly mistake passersby for people she knew. At Deep Springs, she had known every face; encountering someone she didn’t recognize would have been cause for concern. In Cambridge, she was forced to become accustomed to a state of mutual anonymity with people whose lives ran parallel to her own.

In some of America’s most celebrated reflections on nature and the individual, Ralph Waldo Emerson championed “self-reliance” — the independence of mind to think and act according to one’s own convictions, most famously articulated in his essay of the same name. But what Deep Springs alumni seem to miss most about their own excursions into nature was another kind of reliance — a reliance on one other, their collective endeavors, and the small and interconnected world they inhabited. Their interdependence came with a deep-rooted sense of responsibility toward one’s teachers, peers, and obligations.

As Ethan B. Reichsman ’19 puts it, “Oh, I missed milking the cow this morning, so now there is no milk, right?” By contrast, at Harvard “there is only very attenuated causal links between me not fulfilling the responsibility and impacting somebody else.”

For Mikulasek, this freedom initially made her academic work seem to lack the purpose she’d found in the desert. But with time, and much reading, she came to appreciate the independence.

Last spring, Mikulasek spent two and a half weeks laboring over a metaphysics paper, much of that time devoted to “just sitting at my computer and hashing it out with myself.” The solitude afforded her a patience with her own thinking that had been difficult to cultivate at Deep Springs, culminating in a paper that she considered “good for the first time.” Gradually, she realized that “the end of an education could just be me.”

Mikulasek’s experience suggested another difference between the two colleges: their competing ideas of what it really means to live out the liberal arts. Reichsman says each Deep Springs student is a “forced generalist,” called upon to participate in nearly every aspect of the college’s life. Where Deep Springs sought to develop the whole person through a breadth of intellectual and practical responsibilities, Harvard offered the opportunity to pursue a single discipline in extraordinary depth.

“I think I enjoyed Harvard more once I stopped trying to make it Deep Springs,” Duane says.

Deep Springs, then, could be appreciated for what it offered without being held up as an ideal for life beyond the valley. Its intimacy depended on circumstances difficult to sustain elsewhere, and its alumni recognize the privilege of experiencing ranch labor as an educational exercise, knowing that they will eventually leave it behind.

At the same time, its romanticized isolation and reverence for the ordinary might belong to what Liao calls a “a Deep Springs elitist perspective.” Remembering one of his favorite jobs, washing dishes — enjoying blasting music, getting drenched by the water — he recalls thinking, “Wow, I did not have to be out in the middle of nowhere to do this.”

When I spoke to Jacob S. Hundt, a Deep Springs alumnus who founded Thoreau College in Wisconsin, he invoked Henry David Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond, which was only a fairly short walk from town. Thoreau had not abandoned society altogether; in his cabin situated so near the railroad to civilization, he had stepped away long enough (two years) and far enough to examine it with a more critical eye. Deep Springs, too, offers a temporary distance from ordinary life, giving students the chance to question its assumptions before returning to it.

During his admissions interview at Deep Springs, Liao recalls a professor questioning his repeated use of the word “lens” when discussing how people were interpreting an issue. “Isn’t that really limiting your sight?” she asked. As Liao remembers her argument, lenses could be really “limiting your peripheral vision, making you see things that aren’t even there.” Indeed, without their eventual return to civilization, students might be left seeing the world through the very lens their education was meant to challenge, remaining myopic to the infinite variety of perspectives, circumstances, and ways of living beyond the valley.

For Duane, the capacity to imagine life differently is central to the liberal arts. Education should offer students the means to question the arrangements of their own lives, encounter unfamiliar perspectives, and “displace” themselves, making the world feel larger through the possibility of other ways of living.

It’s an exercise that extends beyond Deep Springs, to what students might make of their education once they leave the valley. As Reichsman puts it, he wishes Harvard students would ask one another more often: “What did you come here for? And are you doing it?”

For many of us, the answer might not be so clear. Liao, however, seems to be on the right track.

Through environmental engineering, Liao realized he could serve people in much the same way as the practical work he had done on the ranch. “You take this very specific mundane thing that most people wouldn’t think about, the soil, and you learn to read it in a way,” he says, explaining how caring for it can prevent buildings from collapsing and roads from cracking. Deep Springs had taught him to pay attention to his surroundings; Harvard could give him the technical knowledge to act upon what he observed.

Harvard can’t be Deep Springs — and maybe it shouldn’t try. But Liao thinks everyone, Deep Springs alumni and Harvard students alike, might benefit from turning, when they can, toward the world immediately before them. Between papers, exams, and the pursuit of our own ambitions, there is immense value in noticing the people and places around us and questioning the assumptions through which we understand them. There is, too, the more inward work of examining our own lives, of considering what gives them meaning, and what we might wish to make of them.

When I meet Liao in the Zimmer Hall courtyard, our conversation eventually turns to the ground beneath us.

In an urban soils course at Harvard, he tells me, his class had visited this very courtyard to examine its poor soil. He gestures toward the sparse vegetation, pointing out the fabric stretched over the earth and the plastic mesh beneath it, installed to keep the ground stable.

Liao suggests that alongside the study of great thinkers and the nature of the universe, there is value in attending to “the very small problems and idiosyncrasies around you.” As he continues describing the soil beneath our feet, I glance past the notebook sprawled across our table and toward the ground.

The fabric is plainly visible now, emerging between patches of struggling grass. Behind us stands Cabot Science Library, and around us the familiar concrete of the courtyard. Liao is still talking, pointing out another detail in the soil. I lean forward to see what he means.