Deuel is one of 26 students at Deep Springs College, a working ranch and enclave of brilliant boys and moon-eyed cows tucked in a high desert valley that straddles the California-Nevada border. It is considered a self-governing community: Along with a handful of trustees and faculty, students determine policy, hire and fire faculty, decide who is admitted and design course offerings. Relations between students and trustees have been historically strained, however. For years, students were bucking to admit women and trustees resisted, and now that pendulum has reversed. "Change is no longer something that has to be fought for because it's happening all around us," Deuel notes. "The struggle to go coed was a seductive fight because it was a fight. Now it could almost be coming from above." Last year, Deuel reveled in the trailer park architecture and carpets stained with cat piss. Then the college became rather well endowed and trustees pushed for a $2 million dorm and pretty trash cans. Wealth is insidious to Deep Springs' way of life -- even more insidious than girls.

Also Today Contemplating Deeper Springs Between herding cattle and scribbling essays, one young man finds the time to dance disco under a black light.

Rich guilt is on the agenda at Friday night's student body meeting. "SB," as the weekly governing session is called, can crawl past midnight and "tends to get personal." "Don't absolve yourselves," Michael Pihos drops his knitting to chide the others. "We all voted for that television! And if you don't like the opulence of the dorm, don't sleep in it!" The boarding house cafeteria echoes with finger snaps, the SB signal for agreement. Deep Springers will elect a new SB president tonight and Ian Bloom campaigns on a squatter ticket, reminding his peers that he protested the new dorm. "We built a shantytown and camped outside to prove that we didn't need to sleep in the building. We roasted sausages and sang 'Keep on Rocking in the Free World.'" If elected, Bloom promises, he will prevent the "decadence and deterioration of Deep Springs!"

According to Deuel, Deep Springs students are basically "rich white guys." They've tasted decadence and privilege and chosen to sacrifice wine, women and Harvard. Besides the prohibition policy, an isolation rule frowns on students leaving the valley except during school breaks. It's a moot point: The nearest town is rusted shut by 10 p.m., an hour's drive and 50 years back in time. When an eccentric industrialist named L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs in 1917, he envisioned a cocoon, immune to the material and sensual decadence that winked in cities' neon lights. "Great leaders in all ages have sought the desert and heard its voice," Nunn addressed students in 1923. "You can hear it if you listen, but you cannot hear it while in the midst of uproar and strife for material things."

Nunn's mission was to marry practical and abstract learning while building character, to educate an elite group of men to lead and serve humanity. The school is free; an endowment and revenues from the ranch cover tuition, room and board. After two years at Deep Springs, students transfer into such colleges as Harvard and Berkeley. The office sends 20,000 brochures a year to men who rank in the top 5 percent of the PSATs (applicants' average SAT score is 1500). Of those, 200 seniors wade through seven essay questions to apply (one answered with a symphony while another sent handmade sausage). Round two is an hour and a half interview with a committee of nine students and two faculty members. Interviewees are handed a piece of chalk or a napkin to fiddle with and thawed with an ice breaker: What do you think about sumo wrestling? Curveballs come later: What is evil? How do you reconcile education and elitism with service to humanity? A dozen men are then invited to attend Deep Springs, and very rarely do they reject the offer. "I knew that if I didn't come here," Deuel says, "I'd regret it for the rest of my life."

Deep Springers have been known to meet at midnight in the dairy barn for a Derrida reading group. Minutes before SB, Nick Gossen perches at the dorm piano and tickles off a Debussy concerto as if he were flossing his teeth. They're just as intense during bouts of frivolity. The end of term is celebrated with a frenetic dance party called a "boojee." When wildflowers bloom, it's time for nude spring cleaning, and beneath a summer's full moon, the boys slide bare-butted down Eureka Valley sand dunes. Midway through SB, someone shouts for entertainment and Bryden Sweeney-Taylor claws off his shirt as he dashes outside. Under desert stars, two pickup trucks lurch to a halt, their high beams glowing on Sweeney-Taylor and Thomas Kolb as they tussle in the dirt. "Pin his arm!" The crowd shouts. "Crush him!" You might even mistake them for 18-year-old boys, until SB reconvenes and a student complains about class time being wasted by an "excess of vulgarity." Then you realize that age may be defined in people years, dog years or Deep Springs years.

Mornings are occupied with courses that vary from "Sustainable Agriculture" ("the worst smelling class") to "Bloody, Strong and Resolute: Early Modern Tragedy and the Structure of Violence." Afternoons are blue-collar: Students brand, castrate and slaughter cattle, collect eggs and milk and make cheese. They rotate jobs that include cowboy (most coveted) to butcher, which is taught with an instructional video. "Authentic" is a word that's often tacked to the labor program. The cattle ranch is a business, but the labor program was not created for profit. It is designed to teach self-reliance and responsibility. "There are a lot of city white boys working on this ranch taking ourselves very seriously," says Michael Thoms. "We go to lengths to make sure that people know what we're doing is real."

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