To the Editor:
Re “A Cattle Ranch Is Doing What the Ivy League Can’t,” by Michal Leibowitz (Opinion guest essay, May 24):
This essay identifies an experience no longer available at many American colleges: students who are invested in the mission of the school where they have chosen to study. As an alumnus of Deep Springs College in California, the subject of the essay, I can confirm both how transformative and how rare that feeling is.
It is also what led me to help build Outer Coast, a new two-year liberal arts institution in Sitka, Alaska, that graduated its inaugural class on May 8. Like Deep Springs and Berea College in Kentucky, Outer Coast asks students to do real work: harvesting food for elders, shoveling snow through the winter, restoring a local boathouse and other tasks.
This not only creates real stakes for the student body but also fosters interdependence and a common good between the institution and the town it calls home — a relationship that benefits students and the broader community.
As the essay suggests, aspects of these educational models could be incorporated into the Ivy League and other universities. They can also be started from scratch, today, in the places that need them most.
Bryden Sweeney-Taylor
Sitka, Alaska
To the Editor:
Michal Leibowitz’s essay about Deep Springs College highlights universal lessons about what constitutes excellence in education. These are lessons that Outward Bound has brought to classrooms across New York City in partnerships with more than 100 schools. We foster learning within a community where students look out for and care for one another so they feel a sense of belonging and shared responsibility, and education becomes a collective endeavor.
In the words of the Outward Bound co-founder Kurt Hahn, “We are crew, not passengers.”
It’s also critical that students have agency. When trusted to lead and shape their own learning, they develop confidence and critical thinking, and engage more deeply.
Finally, the essay underscores the value of hard, challenging work. Growth comes not from ease, but from grappling with difficulty, experiencing both success and failure, and building resilience.
While institutions like Deep Springs may be rare, these principles should not be. They can — and should — be part of every student’s education. We know from direct experience that there are educators across New York public schools working hard to make that so.
Laurie Adams
New York
The writer is the chief executive of NYC Outward Bound Schools.
To the Editor:
Michal Leibowitz writes, “We are beginning to see that a nation of individuals unconstrained by virtue or a sense of communal responsibility has few ways out of collapsing social trust — and the political and economic problems that creates.”
Partly “owning” the college you’re attending, as students at Deep Springs College do, is one way to help correct this. But schools that can’t quite do this can at least require that students learn that education is more than job training.
When I studied for a degree in chemistry from Le Moyne College, a Jesuit school in Syracuse, N.Y., I was required to take one year of American history and eight semesters of philosophy — not to help me find my place in a chemistry career, but to help me find my place in society.
Thomas Donvito
Madison, N.J.
To the Editor:
In the 1960s my brother and I were part if a teenage camper worker program at Camp Poyntelle-Lewis in Pennsylvania. We waited on younger campers in the dining room, did construction work on the new camp, Lewis, and cooked workers their breakfast daily on a charcoal-fired griddle.
Lessons learned there have stayed with me for a lifetime.
Jules Traugot
New Paltz, N.Y.
