David Neidorf has announced his departure from the position of President at Deep Springs, effective at the end of the 2020 academic year – June 30, 2020. David assumed the president’s job in 2008 after serving as vice-president 2005-2008. Prior to that, he was a frequent visiting faculty member since the mid-1990s. Mr. Neidorf has led Deep Springs through the Great Recession, the college’s centennial, and the recent transition to a coeducational student body, as well as two reaccreditation reviews and successful capital funding campaigns that have doubled the college’s endowment and financed replacement of the Boarding House.

A committee comprised of alumni, former faculty, students, and board members has convened to conduct a search for a new president who will begin with the 2021 academic year in July, 2020. The Trustees have retained the services of executive search firm Carlson-Beck to assist with the process. Carlson-Beck specializes in executive placements for non-profit and philanthropic organizations, and managing partner Sally Carlson has a decade’s experience with Deep Springs. The committee will be considering candidates through the summer and plans to conduct interviews in the fall.

For further information about the position and criteria the board is using for their search, please see the Employment tab of the website.

Heide was born at Deep Springs in 1926 when her father Martin Sachse was the mechanic. She died on August 19 at age 92 after a long illness. Heide loved Deep Springs, and family lore involving Deep Springs is copious.

Martin met L.L. Nunn after the Great War and started work at Deep Springs after serving as a mechanic and pilot for Germany. Martin was famous for his zither playing, letter-writing campaign to woo bride-to-be Kate Park in Los Angeles, and his conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed Martin’s never-built house on the main circle.

Heide was one of two daughters (the other was Rosemary) to Martin and Kate, and she was famously dandled on the knee by Death Valley Scotty during a visit there with her parents and the student body. The Sachse family moved to Oregon when Heide was a just two years old, but Deep Springs was where it all began. She last visited the Valley in 2007.

This reminiscence was generously provided by Andy Moore and Nancy Jewhurst.

With great sadness, we share the news that Long-Term Social Sciences Professor Jenny Smith has died after a 3-year battle with cancer.

Throughout her illness, Jenny remained a vital community presence, RCom and ApCom member, and teacher who (in the words of one recent alumnus) brought “students into different discourses and conversations that push us to be more committed to fixing the problems of this world.”

Jenny completed an undergraduate degree in Political Science at the New College of Florida and a PhD at Yale University. She also studied in the UK and in Germany (the latter on a Fulbright fellowship). Jenny’s work focused on political parties in the US and Europe. Her collaborative work highlighting the role of informal but broadly recognized norms in democracies, and the effects of these norms on political outcomes, was recently cited in the New York Times Magazine. Before coming to Deep Springs in the fall of 2014, Jenny held faculty positions at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Jenny died peacefully on August 8, 2018, at home in Lexington Kentucky and surrounded by friends and family. Jenny’s tangible, continuing legacy at Deep Springs lives on in the beautiful garden behind MidFac in which she loved to work, as well as in a memorial garden and bench that have been dedicated to her in the expanded orchard.

A fuller memorial notice is forthcoming in our Fall Newsletter.

For those of you wondering how the recently passed tax law will be felt at Deep Springs, the answer is…we don’t really know yet, but it is the impact on charitable donations that remains unknown.

Charitable Donations: Philanthropic professionals agree that the new law will reduce charitable giving by increasing the number of people who do not itemize donations, and therefore lose access to the tax advantages of their donations. But there is disagreement about the net effect of the reduction—I have seen a range of predictions, from 15% to 40%. Only time will tell.

Endowment Tax: The original bill imposed a 1.4% excise tax on the investment income of private colleges with investments of over $500,000 per student, but exempted colleges with “less than 500 tuition-paying students.” With this language Deep Springs would have been doubly protected from the tax; we have fewer than 500 students, and none of our students are tuition-paying. The final version, however, removed the term “tuition-paying,” but left intact the exemption for colleges like ours with less than 500 students. Since there are few colleges with fewer than 500 students and investments of the requisite size, (ours are nearly $800,000 per student at the present time), and the writers of the legislation did not compose the exemption with Deep Springs in mind, we have taken steps to alert our congressman in case further changes are considered.

Unrelated Business Income: The changes in the new law to the way colleges are taxed for unrelated business income do not apply to Deep Springs, because our agricultural operations are educational enterprises, not businesses.

Taxes on Interest Paid by Certain Bonds: Deep Springs does not use bond financing, so this provision does not impact the college.

Coincidence? We don’t know how those who drafted the tax bill felt about their time in higher education. But we note on reading the bill that immediately following the section increasing taxes on colleges (Part VIII) comes a section reducing taxes on beer (Part IX). Here again, because of our ground rules, Deep Springs is not impacted by this change in the law.

Further Information: We will share more information with the Deep Springs community as it becomes available to us.

Best wishes for the holiday season,

David Neidorf