By the time I left NOLS in 1997 I was a vocal critic of its administration. But although nine years as an instructor - and one as a branch administrator - gave me plenty of opportunity to explore the workings of the place, most of the key observations I had to make about problems at NOLS were already apparent to me after my first four summers. I spent most of my years at the school reiterating these ideas, refining their presentation, and discovering that I was not alone: almost every other instructor I met at NOLS was voicing the same themes. Needless to say, although shows were regularly made of responding to criticism, the administration never accepted the actual points..

I use a number of terms here that bear clarification. I often refer to the "administration" or the "front office" (or simply the "office") by which I mean the headquarters in Lander. I see this group as composed of many good people who are nonetheless under the influence of NOLS's core "boosters," people who have set the agenda of increasing the prestige of the school rather than seeing to the welfare of its community (1). Not all administrators and board members are boosters. In fact a relatively small number of people have steered the school in this direction, and they have only been successful because other board members, branch staffers (myself sometimes included) and administrators have gone along with what appear to be reasonable proposals. (Why is it that in town, critical thinking is often replaced by a desire to fit in?) As a result, the inner circle of the headquarters directors and their closest associates run an operation in Lander which includes many good people and yet is doing real harm to the school. It is my hope that putting these observations down in writing may give people more ammunition to shoot holes in what appear to be "reasonable proposals."

Each of these points is essentially ironic: I have paired my observations about the nature of the school with observations about how the boosters are willing to have the administration perceive or represent the school. A strong theme is the amount of self-deception - indeed, the huge amount of self-deception - which the administration must now practice to make sense of its actions. That it is getting hard to separate the sources of disinformation from the participants in disinformation is a bad sign for the reversibility of what has happened to the NOLS culture of critical thinking. Living these lies is not only sending this ship of good people in the wrong direction, it may be sinking it.

An essential aspect of the booster agenda is to pretend that NOLS is what it is not. I have attempted here to set down, plain and simple, what NOLS is - without viewing it through any lens of desire. If I have a strong sarcastic tone, it is perhaps because I have been listening to the official party line on NOLS for so long that I find the ironies screamingly compelling.

NOLS is not primarily about skills. Most NOLS students do not enroll because of a serious interest in the "core curriculum." Nor do most of them have a genuine desire to become outdoor leaders - to the extent that a student who does is a refreshing exception. They come for all sorts of things that can be found on a wilderness expedition program: hardship, socializing, beauty, a rite-of-passage, clarification of personal values, or confidence building. Just because a student says, "I'm here to improve my skills," means little: the educational system teaches them early on to say what the teacher wants to hear.

Nevertheless, the NOLS literature (internal and external) maintains that the school exists primarily to teach skills, and that students come to learn skills. This is useful idea to differentiate NOLS from Outward Bound, a program to which in the students' eyes it is quite similar. But it encourages the mistaken idea that the heart of a course remains intact when reduced in length or broken up into a series of seminars. It also creates the illusion that NOLS is serving a skills-interested community which is distinct from the personal-growth community which other programs serve.

NOLS is strongly about social values. NOLS courses, as traveling communities, are intimately organised around a set of social values which are liberal, communitarian and altruistic. Specifically, these are:

• personal scale - direct interpersonal interactions not mediated by technology (writing, telephone, fax, etc.) and against systematization (rules, policy, regulation)
• personal responsibility - people taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and delegating real responsibility to each other
• intimacy - people living in close quarters sharing space, food, clothing, schedules, goals, joys, disappointments, hopes, fears, etc.
• tribalism - the group taking precedence over the individual
• service - dedication to a higher cause and looking out for the good of others
• egalitarianism - all members of the expedition are of equal value
• open-mindedness about issues, each other, and one's rights and responsibilities.
• humility - both in the face of challenges and before other people
• personal respect - the basic ground rule for interaction
• minimum impact on the natural world - consuming just as much as is needed to get by, thinking about the impact of one's actions on strangers
• simplicity - in particular non-materialism.
• humor - responding to adversity in ways that shine light
• telling it like it is - the refreshing straightforward honesty of a wilderness trip
• trust - relationships mediated by trust as opposed to written agreements, contracts, etc.
• meeting and managing danger - living in awareness of daily risk and allowing that to affect one's outlook, e.g., gratitude
• integrity - when actions, individual or collective, honor the values above
• attention to the maintenance of the community itself

An equally important trait of NOLS courses is disdain for the dark shadow that accompanies our bright social vision. A commonplace experience is sitting in a beautiful, remote place lamenting society's fondness for the opposites of NOLS values: the glorification of self-interest, the evasion of responsibility, the inequitable distribution of wealth, the perfidy of competition and the culture of the short-sighted decision. Marketing, advertising, spin control, corporations, self-promotion, the news media, government - disgust with these are as close to the heart of NOLS as the social values (2) themselves.

Social values figure prominently in what students desire to "take home" from NOLS, but the front office somehow maintains that the program has nothing to do with social values, social justice, or the sacred. ("Ethics," in an official context at NOLS, only refers to the use of minimum impact practices in the backcountry, an equation that misleadingly suggests that NOLS is officially concerned with ethics in general). Humility in particular seems absent in the front office (3). The proclamation of NOLS as the "Leader in Wilderness Education" (which raised a few eyebrows in Canada) apparently did not strike its authors as being completely counter to what the organization stands for.

The values which most characterize the school, and which should be visible in its behavior at every level are service, humility, humor and integrity.

NOLS is at heart earthy. NOLS has its moments when it is poised, pretty and tasteful. But on the whole NOLS is a earthy place where people cheerfully discuss their defecation sites, don't go out of sight to pee and don't wash their hair for weeks. NOLS is lively people, muddy people, body odors, nude swimming, and spicy food. It is a school of people whose common theme is that they like to go out camping in the wilderness, whose traits tend to be courage, daring - and flipping the bird to society. They are typically irreverent, inconsistent, and unconcerned with image, ordinary looking if attractively athletic. Enough aspects of NOLS are funky, dirty, lusty, magical, and wild, that the real school will never play well on TV without serious make-up (4). A hundred personal gritty realities, such as dirty jokes or having a crush on someone, are significant components of course realities. There is fooling around between students, and not a little between students and instructors. Alcohol and pot are still out there. A NOLS course is not a crude, backwards earthiness; it is festive, modern people enjoying unpretentious outdoor living and a freedom from social context. In short, NOLS may be beautiful but it is rarely pretty.

The front office paints a rather different picture of NOLS. The catalog is highly sanitized: mountains, marmots and meadows. People always seem to be learning something, or having a valuable experience. The funk does not make it in (5). Rules forbidding alcohol, pot, sex, etc. are on file (6). Ironically NOLS's earthiness may be one of its greatest assets, in that its unpretentious nature gives it the right to speak plainly on social issues and "tell it like it is."

NOLS represents ideas challenging to the general public. NOLS is actually not that easy for people to swallow. The social values of NOLS represent a radical agenda for society that proposes reduced consumption, no development, population reduction, expecting people to take responsibility for themselves (thus throwing most petty lawsuits out of court), and reining in transnational corporations and their free-market philosophy. NOLS teaches people how to escape from society. It seems a fair appraisal that although they may think NOLS runs a wonderful program, most non-students would be quite challenged by what the organization stands for.

When NOLS interacts with the larger society, it has a choice of lying. NOLS can present itself as an non-profit educational corporation with a written curriculum, personnel policies, and a mission statement. It can publish a State of the School Report that looks as glossy and status quo as something from Harvard. These poses serve a function: they smooth business transactions; but they are not meant to be taken seriously within the organization. Ironically, many significant administrators at NOLS appear to have swallowed the pose as the real thing. As people who did not begin as instructors are added to the NOLS office, they may not carry the unstated understanding of what the school is really about. The resultant tidal forces are ripping NOLS apart..

NOLS has a significant spiritual component. On every NOLS course there is the desire of students to meet the wilderness and - for want of a better term - be healed by it. There is a seeking to commune with the heart of the place, and to obtain a wisdom from it not to be found in the workaday world. The transcendent effect of wilderness travel gives it the quality of an encounter with the sacred. Both the school's political agenda (to protect more wild lands) and the minimum impact practices are expressions of reverence (7) for the sacred.

The extensive arguments for the wilderness being sacred, specifically for modern wilderness travelers from the developed world, are well made in Joseph Sax's Mountains Without Handrails and various writings of Deep Ecology. Sax's description of the modern outdoors person fits NOLS people well: "a prophet for some kind of secular religion," having

a repugnance at the seemingly boundless materialism that infused American life, a spiritual attachment to nature, and a self-congratulatory attitude towards preservation of nature's bounty.

NOLS students and instructors alike are compellingly attracted to the power element in nature, and courses encounter it - perhaps by reading The Lorax, perhaps through a sweat lodge or a solo. But despite the constant flow of people returning from the deep wild bearing the imprint of powerful experiences, the NOLS office seems to ignore this part of the experience. Perhaps they can't figure out where to put it in an annual report. Or perhaps they have mistakenly confused NOLS's antipathy for the touchy-feely with a discomfort with the powerful.

Every NOLS course is different. NOLS courses are strongly influenced by weather, location, the unconscious prejudices and desires of instructors and students, injury and illness. After all these factors have set the scene, instructors and students juggle their various conscious priorities and make still further defining decisions. No two NOLS courses share the same reality - much as no two snow crystals share the same form. NOLS courses are "internally consistent" in that their progressions and themes form a pattern - but students from different courses comparing their stories find that other courses have different tones, flavors and music. This is not to contradict what was said above: topics of instruction, values and goals are consistent; but the results are not.

The administration likes to paint a picture where NOLS courses are so machined that a student knows what they will get, as if expeditions could be predictable (and if they were, why would anyone want to go on one?). Similarly, the front office is ready to assure land managers that its courses literally Leave No Trace - since "each course teaches LNT principles." In fact, students are a mixed bag, some of whom are good at LNT and some of whom are not. The crisp, mathematical simplicity claimed by the office and the real thing are not the same.

NOLS is more like a theatre company than a corporation. Neither the metaphor of NOLS as a "school," nor as a professional "corporation" accurately describes the true character of the organization (8). The most appropriate metaphor for NOLS is the performing arts troupe. This metaphor gives a realistic picture of the creativity, self-motivation, vision and ego of instructors, and of the instructor-student (performer-audience) interaction energy. It acknowledges the way instructors pull life experience into their work, improvise, and perform in real time - for as long as it takes. It also recognizes that a student's experience of a course may include elements which are more a part of theatre than reality, e.g., imagined danger where none existed, or imagined triumph where none existed. This metaphor's elements of audition (9), firing and hiring, ticket sales, theater rental and payroll management provide an appropriate guide for the functions of the administration (10). It appropriately presents administration in a role of supporting what goes on in the field.

In contrast, the metaphor of NOLS as a school (enshrined by Petzoldt in the organizational name) is useful to a degree, but often is taken too seriously. It leads to the inaccurate picture that wilderness is a "classroom," that instructors have only a professional relationship with students, and that "curriculum" is devised by administrators and simply delivered by teacher-techs in the field. The metaphor of NOLS as professional corporation is even less accurate and leads to picture that is surreal: that what NOLS does is somehow an "industry;" that wilderness is a "resource" of which travelers are "users;" that NOLS administrators are responsible for what occurs in the field; that instructors are "contract employees;" and that what goes on in the field can be written down as a set of procedures (11).

The metaphor of NOLS-as-performing-arts-troupe offers little sympathy to students who fail to put good energy into a course and then complain they disliked it. Nevertheless, the office pushes the metaphor of NOLS-as-professional-corporation, one of whose elements is that a student ("buyer") has a right to a course ("product") that satisfies him. Since the customer is by definition right, the student need take no responsibility in the creation of the course, and if there is a problem the source of that problem is probably a lower level employee, i.e., an instructor.

But one must also remember that no metaphor is a complete substitute for the real thing. Deaths and serious injuries occur in wilderness work, and that is very different from schools, theaters and corporations. In this sense NOLS has a similarity to the military, a similarity that the organization has not yet explored or exploited.

NOLS courses transform people, and this an important work. The rite-of-passage effect persists at NOLS whether instructors consciously participate in it or not. The archetypal hero's journey is played out as the student journeys outside of society into a dangerous and unfamiliar place, learns from mysterious figures, survives trials, and returns to society as a slightly different person from the one who went out (12). The sense of being a somewhat new person after a NOLS course is a very common thing students talk about, and is what a lot of students come looking for. In a major sense NOLS courses owe their draw to the personal transformation they often provide.

The fact that NOLS courses offer the opportunity for this kind of personally transformative journey suggest that NOLS may be more significant than merely a center for recreational learning. A positive, service-oriented rite of passage is of huge value to a society which lacks any sort of transitional rites. It is more important than the minimum impact practices which are so loudly touted. However, for some reason the front office has never acknowledged this aspect of NOLS. In their view, what one "gets" at NOLS has nothing to do with the health of society as a whole and is purely a private issue, a value-neutral personal possession which, like a new pair of pants, implies neither new rights nor new responsibilities.

NOLS is an exclusive organization. A person who decides to apply for an Instructors Course has a one in three (or four) chance of being accepted, a 70% chance of getting work if they graduate, and perhaps a 50% chance of year-round work if they clear their schedule for NOLS. The net result is that perhaps 10% of IC applicants will someday become full time staff. Simultaneously, with the tuition for a course generally between $2500 and $3000, very few people can afford NOLS courses. These forms of selectivity make NOLS an exclusive community (13).

NOLS is uncomfortable with its exclusive nature. It inhibits the goal of being an egalitarian center and a source of information for the entire outdoor community. Scholarships are available, but the actual remedy - figuring out a way to make wilderness travel (which is inherently cheap) affordable for everyone, and divorce the organization from the outdoor retailers' circuit, has not been taken. Instead, much is made of offering short courses near urban areas to "make NOLS available" to more people. The fact that these people would not be getting the actual essence of what NOLS represents, and that this does not help NOLS's true audience, is ignored.

Being outside the structure of society is an essential element of NOLS courses. To achieve the transformative effect, courses must take place outside of the structure of society, in a place where society's laws, mores, and regulations do not apply. Yet typical societal ideas are gradually being extended out into the world of courses: no marijuana, no alcohol, a helmet policy, a no-sex policy, thoughts about legal liability, documentation of everything, an insistence on behavioral contracts before a non-med evac! This extension of society out into a place where it does not belong will drive the transformative space away from NOLS courses. Similarly necessary is the presence of real danger. The idea of justifying every risk by a "curriculum outcome" betrays - unless NOLS recognizes transformation as a "curriculum outcome" - a trend to remove as much danger as possible from the program. This too will push NOLS courses towards merely being an imitation of the real thing. The wild is a dangerous place beyond the bounds of society: that is why people go there.

This is not to say that NOLS courses do not enjoy their own constraining ideas. NOLS courses are experimental communities that employ scads of norms - but these are very different from the norms of society. As in initiatory ceremonies, there are rules for behavior, but the rules are different from those of normal life.

The instructor-student relationship is not a professional one. Instructors (14) are many things to their students: doctor, therapist, friend, teacher, authority figure, co-conspirator. They have a genuine interest in the students, a desire to share with the students, a desire to live and travel with the students (15). This is not a professional relationship. The idea that instructors and students must maintain professional distance is borrowed from the highly professional therapist/client relationship, which is completely different from what NOLS does.

The boosters maintain that this is however a professional relationship, perhaps because they fear being held responsible for something that is so intimate and personal. (Certainly it seems that one of the fruits of the corporate metaphor is the fear of being held responsible.) They also promulgate the mistaken idea that all NOLS instructors want to be regarded as professionals. While it is true that most NOLS people hear, "When are you getting a real job?" all too often from their elders, they do not want to be professionals. A professional role (which implies a functional rather than personal relationship to the public) is what they are escaping by coming to NOLS..

Instructing at NOLS is not a "job" in the normal sense. Unlike the classic "job," instructing has almost no boundaries (16). The instructor is on the expedition twenty-four hours a day, essentially living the work. She has to gain a rapport with numerous strangers quickly - any thread of life experience may come in handy - and sew herself along with everyone else into the fabric of the expedition. It is not a place for professional distance. In addition, instructors are authority figures for problems mental, spiritual, and emotional - in addition to the logistical and physical. They deal with mental illness, religious harassment, nervous breakdowns, eating disorders, grief over a death in the family, inappropriate behavior, depression, ruptured love affairs - there is no limit. There is no skill or experience from one's life that may not come in handy on the next course: a foreign language, musical training, a passion for carpentry. As such the instructor is part of NOLS in part for their outdoor and teaching skills, and in part for who they are.

The instructor is a kind of dedicant, who basically takes on the responsibility of making a model expedition - on whatever level that challenge happens to occur. When the course happens upon injured strangers or the vehicle breaks down en route to a roadhead s/he does not say, "I wasn't hired for this," and walk away. There is a commitment to an ideal performance which transcends adherence to a job description. Instructing at NOLS in this sense is much more of a "calling" than a job.

The front office, however, casts the instructor (using the professional corporate model) as a "hired employee." This does no honor to either the instructor's commitment to making the school (17) work, nor the trust which the school puts in that person (18). It also leads to the false conclusion that the school can "make" an instructor through a series of trainings. NOLS instructors are remarkable people most of whose esoteric skills, knowledge and experience reflect their own interests for years prior to their arrival at the school. Official trainings augment but can not replace the background that underlies a person who can pull off this multi-faceted performance role.

Written evaluation at NOLS is poorly thought out. There is a perennial debate over student evaluations at NOLS. Many instructors think that writing them is a waste of time, that they are irrelevant to the point of the experience, that they set the wrong tome. Well over half the students are indifferent to them. Every couple years they are simplified, altered, complexified. Reducing the amount of time they take seems to be a goal.

For whom are they written? If evaluations were for the admissions office, there are simpler ways to flag excellent and dreadful students for the future. If they are for the student, perhaps they only need be written for the students who want a written one (19). If for the parent, why not write them after the students leave? (20) Why the emphasis on going through the painful process of discussing them with the students? Arguably, evaluations function as a cathartic way for instructor teams to gain closure with a group they have lived with for weeks - and yet there could be simpler ways to do this. Written evaluations may in fact be chiefly written for the boosters, for whom they reinforce the prestigious school metaphor, and imply that what NOLS is doing is important, significant, and formal. It might be interesting for an instructor to think about that the next time s/he is writing an eval for a student who doesn't really want one.

Instructor-of-instructor evaluations are similarly ill-thought-out. If constructive criticism is the point, why write evals while still in the field when the instructors are too close together to have good perspective on each other? (21) If the purpose is to communicate who's hot and who's not to the staffing office, why the "witch-hunt" conclusion that somebody's hiding something when there is an eval without criticism? Boosters live in a quasi-paranoid world where they strongly suspect there's an instructor out there who's going to expose them to a lawsuit, and by turning up the evaluational heat they hope to flush that person (22). Improving courses and helping good instructors get more work are not their priorities.

NOLS's natural audience is the larger outdoor community. The NOLS priorities reflect the interests and biases of the culture of American outdoor people in general, a typically well-educated, socially liberal group influenced by the localized politics of Wendell Barry, the economics of Schumaker's Small is Beautiful, and the bioregional ethics of Aldo Leopold.. This is an idealistic sub-culture of North America and Europe with which NOLS is intimately connected, from which it draws its instructors and to which (at least when one allows the "radical agenda" view) it is shepherding as many of its starry-eyed, would-be non-conformist students as possible. This "mothering community" causes similar priorities tend to crop up at outdoor programs everywhere.

NOLS exists to serve these people who, a minority everywhere, crave community with each other. Students come to be part of the smaller NOLS community, if only temporarily, to have their values reinforced, to meet role models and grow their dreams. Perhaps the greatest service the school can offer to graduates is to serve as a connection to other outdoors people - not just those who are at NOLS. NOLS has such potential to be a reassuring and reinforcing asset for this socially alternative community that its subversion to the corporate model is tragic.

Service to the outdoor community makes it a priority to offer affordable courses to all outdoor people, regardless of their ability to pay; and to screen out students who have no sincere connection to wild places. Instead the admissions department is told to screen chiefly on a medical basis and to fulfill "enrolment goals," which are quantitative rather than qualitative. This is a disservice to NOLS's natural kin.

The school impresses people by fielding real expeditions. The source of NOLS's appeal is that the freedom, length, danger and remoteness of the school's expeditions are indistinguishable from those of a real trip. Students come for the adventure of the program, which includes rough accommodations, improvised solutions, hardship and no guarantee of safety. One of the most under-appreciated ironies at NOLS is that the tragedy of every death increases the reality - and hence the impressiveness - of the school in the student's eyes (23).

In order to preserve and enhance the school's impressiveness, the priority at NOLS can simply be to continue to make courses as real as possible. Some administrators appear to be working with a different model: that the school is impressive because it has nice buildings, a web site, a voice mail system that answers the phone (24), and an easy-to-read catalog. The simultaneous removal of realistic elements, such as exploratory routes or small group expeditions through areas where the instructors have never been, or the creation of rules about when people are permitted to not wear a helmet or are permitted to make out, erode the appeal of the program (25).

The body of NOLS is in the field. Just as an iceberg is 90% out of sight below the surface, 90% of NOLS is also out of sight - in the field. A small portion of the school sticks "above the surface," into society, and handles bookings, finances, and permits. If one reads the State of the School Report it is easy to get the impression that the achievements of NOLS are the achievements of the offices: new partnerships formed, new permits secured, new programs undertaken with the feds, glee at record enrollment. An accurate State of the School Report would have one page about in-town achievements, and twenty pages about what people experienced in the field that year - the jokes and serious moments as well as the amount learned and distance traveled.

The State of the School Report is not the only forum which brings the office to the fore. The Newsletter also reverses foreground and background by relegating articles by instructors and from branches to later sections, while headlining articles that come out of Lander. It would be nice to see this change.

The reputation of the school is based on the quality of people on courses. In word-of-mouth communication about the school, two elements of course experience speak the loudest. The first is the quality of instructor-student interaction. This is not the quality of the teaching, although students appreciate that; it is the quality of the contact. The basic idea of the NOLS course is that one can pay to acquire the "friendly outdoor mentor," a person who has vast experience yet is willing to take the novice out and share all, not in an impersonal fashion, but in a friendly way. Genuine interest in students by instructors is what students eat up.

The second is the quality of the other students. The number one thing students wonder about their course is, "Will I like the people?" No one wants to go on an organized program with people who don't excite them. When NOLS groups are compatible they are not only at their highest function, but also the most like a real expedition (26). This is the goal.

The boosters appear to be working with a different model: that the school's reputation is based on federal contacts, school size, international presence, professional evaluation, publishing, media presence, research, nice buildings, or public relations (27). Personal interactions seem low on their list. The front office appears to believe that if certain students are problems, there must be some faulty EB that could be corrected through better instruction. No effort is made to deny courses to students who are just along for the ride. Some of the course groups that get put together are pathetic. If word gets out that on your NOLS course you are likely to have some real boneheads, nothing will kill NOLS faster. Contrariwise, if word gets out that NOLS makes a real effort only to accept first class people, that will make the reputation of the school for years to come.

The internal risk management tone at NOLS is poorly thought out. There are two messages instructors receive around safety issues. The first is that instructors are always learning - keep the eyes and mind open for new techniques and ideas, and incorporate them into a bag of tricks. The other is that instructors are "safe" - i.e., they already know all about risk management practices. So if one reports on on one's self-evaluation that s/he learned a new safety technique on a course, is that bad or good? Put another way, the administration has set it up so that it can criticize an instructor for either learning more, or not learning.

This confusion grows out of the collision between the reality that instructors are always learning, and the fact that boosters cannot accommodate such a messy reality in their "marketing." It results from the representation to the public that there is a simple entity called "safety," when in fact the genesis of injuries, illnesses and deaths is complex. Instructors, who are experts in this complex study, have enough to deal with out in the field without worrying whether describing a certain activity as "dangerous" in the log is going to cause an apoplectic fit in town.

The message instructors therefore receive is that image comes before safety. No instructor can accept this. Yet open debate about mistakes and near-misses in the Newsletter is suppressed. How can learning continue without wide dissemination of the stories?

There is an element of denial about the possibility of death. It is a problem that people are dying, but it is even more of a problem that people don't expect such events or that they think they can always be prevented. Death is as real a possibility, although less likely, at NOLS as it is in the military. Only by retaining a consciousness of the possibility of death can the organization come to terms with what it does. Death is also poorly processed at NOLS. There is a grieving focus, but because of the concern over legal liability there is no dissemination of the facts. Deaths become the most shadowy of events, fraught with fear of culpability, guilt over involvement, shame of association and anxiety over consequences. Each death, as presently handled, leaves the organization less capable of handling the next one.

Instructors are the most important players at the school. Instructors are the front line maintainers of the school's reputation. Because they are in contact with both the student population at NOLS and the outdoor community outside NOLS, they speak authoritatively on what NOLS can be, what it should be and what it must be. They are also, by virtue of their constant days spent in the outdoors, the most in contact with the values and priorities that the school represents.

There is quite a battle of words over who really controls the field. The front office has increasingly emphasized that they set "curriculum" and impart goals during the briefing, and therefore can take credit for the quality of courses. In fact, most instructors arrive at the briefing with their own vision of the course already conceived, and with the goal of obtaining the meat of logistical info and getting out of the briefing. The office represents the debriefing process as  catching any safety issues before they become a problem. In reality the picture communicated through the written documentation and a two hour discussion is highly simplified and communicates none of the nuances upon which an effective review would rely. The office increasingly emphasizes that an unbroken chain of "supervision" exists from executive director down to the newest instructor, but in practice most instructor teams work together in a organic web of relationships that has little to do with hierarchy. The office also represents the school as having a reliable, assembly-line-like training system, beginning with the IC, that imparts to instructors all of the right skills and habits to ensure safety (28), but in fact these trainings cover only the basics (especially the IC's) and the bulk of learning for instructors occurs while working with their co-instructors.

The front office plays its most significant role in the selection of instructor teams and the screening of students. Both of these do directly affect course quality. Once these parameters are set, instructor teams are unsupervised and left to their best judgment.

Oddly, instructors are highly underutilized in strategic planing at the school. Administrators have justified this by characterizing them as arrogant, naïve or selfish. They are often viewed as a potential source of problems rather than the creative force that builds the school in the field every season. If instructors ask big, difficult questions, are they naïve, or actually far-sighted and sophisticated?

Prosperity is a two-edged sword for NOLS. When times are good for NOLS (high enrollment), the school benefits by being able to pour money into dreams it has had: more scholarships, better instructor pay, more travel pay. But prosperity also brings the booster elements of the organization out of the closet. Without the prosperity of the late 80's and early 90's NOLS would never have been able to grow four new branches, increase Alaska Wilderness courses from three to ten annually, or raised the number of wilderness course students in the Wind Rivers by 50%. Prosperity fuels good projects, but it fuels foolish ones as well. The best strategy for the school is to remain balanced on the edge of prosperity. This will satisfy the dedicated, who do not mind living on little pay if they are doing a good work, and starve out the boosters (29). The argument that prosperity will permit instructors to be paid more is a devious attempt to lure instructors into looking to their personal interests rather than asking what is right for the whole.

The school has become too big for adequate communication. The Newsletter and weekly fora do not replace personal interaction, which dominated the transmission of ideas and debate at the school in 1987. The sharing of information about actual incidents is crucial to safety and quality of courses. Print is incapable of carrying the kind of rumor and inuendo (except when written by Dave Kalgren!) that characterizes a story related over dinner in a branch kitchen. Also, the Newsletter is regarded as an official forum, so neither real anger nor real debate appear there. With no satisfying outlet, both anger and debate are mounting yearly. In addition, no objecting letter to the editor appears without an instant reply by an administrator, contributing to the sense that this is a controlled and useless forum for community discussion. Give and take between Lander and instructors (and branch staffs) are reduced now to the most formal channels. Alienation has increased and views are diverging.

Other systematized "channels of communication," such as giving complaints to a debriefer who then passes them up the ladder to the Lander office, do not work. Information in these channels gets stripped of its emotional content and becomes easy to disregard. It is imperative that in-town employees and instructors by-pass these channels and take their objections with their full emotional content directly to the Lander offices. No formalized system of communication can replace organic communication that happens in a smaller school. An organization concerned with pursuits as dangerous as wilderness travel - where autonomous decision making will always be required - cannot make do with anything less than broad-band internal communication. This is another way the corporate model is not suited for NOLS. Suspicion and mistrust are new side effects of he school's size.

NOLS is approaching - may already have passed - the point of no return in institutionalization. In 1991 outdoor writer Dave Roberts published a story in which he visited Lander, Wyoming, and went on a short trip in the Wind Rivers. He made his obligatory complaints about the Forest Service (writing in the iconoclastic tradition of Ed Abbey) and then went on to complain about this place called NOLS which was polluting good wilderness with rich kids from the east.

This article was a serious wake-up call that the administration slept right through. By tossing NOLS into the same basket with the Forest Service Roberts was suggesting that NOLS is was no longer a "good guy" for real outdoors people, and had moved into the realm of impersonal, self-interested, big institutions. Roberts is a respectable writer who did his own time at Outward Bound, and although the Outside editors probably required that he take a critical shot at anything bigger than a motel, the fact that he threw the shoe at NOLS - and that it fit - was deeply disturbing.

The institutionalization of NOLS shows up in many ways besides outdoor people deciding it makes a better scapegoat than ally. The school can no longer react quickly to a changing world: it has become a dinosaur mired in a world of planning and permits that requires years of lead time for something as simple as the introduction of a new course. Mistrust between top level administrators and instructors has become endemic (30). The preservation of the school has become more important than minimum impact on the land. Office events are considered more significant than field events. And the school is increasingly seen as a lucrative target for lawsuits (31).

At some point the snowball of changes made to NOLS to meet the needs of the boosters acquires enough speed and mass to become a self-sustaining avalanche where even resistance contributes to the forward momentum. At that point the institutionalization of NOLS will be irreversible without closing the place down and re-opening it under a new name.

NOLS is no longer a community. A community, in its most basic formulation, is a body of people who share a common conception of group identity and a common group allegiance. But more specifically in the outdoor world, "community" refers to a closely knit group of people who share a set of values and ideals, something that is rarely found and is richly aspired to. In this valuable sense, NOLS is no longer a community. The closely knit aspect disappeared with growth: where one could once aspire reasonably to work every course type at every branch and to know every other person at the school, such a goal is now plainly unrealistic. The shared ideals and vision disappeared as the boosters began to mold NOLS for their own purposes. The boosters in fact marked the passing of the NOLS community when they began to praise community as a wonderful aspect of the corporation (an aspect which we should note, however, implied no commitment to their instructors). The school has plenty of soul left, but it is all underground - while the surface is paved over with the façade of a business. The best indication of this is that the boosters create committees to cover what would be natural community functions, such as "staff relations" or "accountability."

The experience of instructing at NOLS is filled with dissonance. Working at NOLS one often experiences dissonance. There is dissonance between the heart of the school, where something like a revolution for an ethical society is being nurtured, and the front office, with its value-neutral, businesslike persona. There is a dissonance between the disgust for consumerism and marketing that hallmarks a NOLS course experience, and the enthusiastic "marketing" of that experience coming out of the front office. It often appears that the right hand of NOLS does not know (or care) what the left hand is doing.

Other dissonances illustrate the huge divide between the boosters and the heart of the school. NOLS courses are about forming a non-competitive community which shares its resources; but the front office casts Outward Bound as an adversary and seeks to defeat it in a "marketplace." (Is not every student for outdoor education a victory for the real cause?) NOLS courses are about distrust of the news media and disgust with media-constructed reality; but the office courts exposure in the likes of Outside (32) and The Wall Street Journal as if they meant something. The ironies are profound.

There is dissonance in the purpose of instructors. The exclusive selection and the excellent training imply that one is to being prepared to be given the cream of outdoor students: motivated, interesting and committed. But the run-of-the-mill students who are increasingly turning up on courses, combined with the resistance from the office to any suggestion that these students do not match the mission of NOLS (the real mission, not the "Mission Statement") send a message that, far from being special, the instructor is a run-of-the-mill employee expected to work with what ever is handed to him.

There is dissonance between the officially open style of leadership within the school, and the reality of dictated changes. For example, instructors howled about the idea of matching field practices to written documents when that idea came out from the director team and the trustees. In eloquent letters to the editor they pointed out the wrong and insulting assumptions, questioned the faulty logic, and laid bare the real motivation: an urgent need in the front office - after the investigation into Katy Brain's death - to appear to know more about what goes on in the field. But the plan rolled forward any way. It was never meant to be up for discussion. There is nothing open about this style of leadership.

The catalogue does not represent NOLS. The NOLS catalog of 1987 began with this very plausible paragraph:

Ten years later there is no such scary appraisal of fact that taking a NOLS course means things are expected of you. The 1998 catalogue contains its exhaustive and legally inspired list of dangers on the Safety page, but when it comes to expectations of the students, all that remains are a couple of abstract sentences which tell one very little about what this will actually be like for the student:

You will be responsible for transporting your own gear. You will sleep outdoors, prepare your own meals and be expected to care for yourself in weather conditions that can be extreme.

Even in 1987, and more so now, the NOLS catalog had a big problem with the implicit message in the photographs and the tone of the writing. Where are the real rigors of a NOLS courses here, to deter the uncommitted? Where are the bad weather pictures? Where are the unhappy student pictures? Why is the catalog printed on difficult-to-recycle, heavy-weight, glossy paper? How are NOLS values reflected in this publication?

Increasingly the style of writing has lost its discipline and become an affectedly colloquial version of a conversation. From the 1998 catalog:

Should NOLS be advertised with the same reassuring tone one would hear in the voice-over of a TV commercial? Students have to realize that if they decide to attend NOLS they are stepping into a world that has really high expectations. The catalog - especially its tone - is one of only three opportunities to get that message across (33).

Increasingly the catalog has dished up whatever might impress and soothe parents. What are these instructor profiles that favor those who have attended a famous university or run a business on the side? Although NOLS is about supporting alternatives to material values, the 1998 catalog's first alumni profile (ostensibly an opportunity for the school to highlight things graduates are doing that represent the flowering of NOLS values) presents the president of "the nation's largest chain of natural food supermarkets," and notes that "sales this year are projected to top the $1 billion mark." The next alumnus profiled "works for Morgan Stanley in New York City" and his book "spent two months on the New York Times Best Seller's list and Ann Landers recommended it to her 9 million readers." This may set the pulse racing in the corporate world, but it has nothing to do with NOLS.

Catalog information content has dropped. In the 1987 catalog the Wind River Wilderness course description included this:

By 1998 again all that scary stuff is gone. The paragraphs describing courses are shorter than ever because it is believed that students don't want to "wade through too many words to find the information they are seeking." The bottom line is that NOLS is content with students who make the decision to enroll chiefly on the basis of photographs. The students whom NOLS is actually supposed to serve, the critical thinkers who want to know a lot of details about what the course will be like, who pay for their course themselves, are not the main audience.

You get back what you put out there. If the NOLS catalog is impulsive, fair-weather and uncritical, that's the kind of students NOLS will get.

Administrative boredom, age and desire to impress sap the school's energy. One of the ironies of NOLS is that former instructors are in the front office advocating growth (34) and manufacturing pretense. This is the result of three factors. One is the fact that the administrative jobs are not interesting - particularly when one was formerly an instructor. It is natural to attempt to continue to influence the field, the one forum at NOLS that everyone is really jazzed about. The front office also spends a large amount of time with people who are not in the outdoor community. Some of these are on the board - others are in offices of government, non-profits, or for-profits. Attempts to impress - and particularly not to offend - this "surrogate audience" explains much of the Lander behavior which saps the school.

Lastly, there is an age/stage of life factor. The office looks like a safe port for instructors who for a variety of reasons no longer want to work as much as possible in the field (35). These people's priorities, values and dreams may no longer be the same as those of the young community NOLS serves, (e.g., freedom, far horizons, adventure and maybe a little rebellion against the status quo). They may have families and they may start to have a different perspective on life. Such a responsible perspective is valid in its own space, but it must remain marginal at NOLS. In the absence of a structure that constantly reinforces and reminds administrators that their work should support the values of the field, these folks tend more and more to introduce into the field inappropriate concepts such as regulation, uniformity, and hierarchy (36).

The net result - of boredom, too much contact with society and growing older - is a trend by office people to take NOLS far too seriously (37). In particular, they may put preserving the school ahead of the quality of its community. They may entertain grandiose ideas that NOLS is so important that the future survival of wilderness itself depends on the survival of NOLS (38). They may be willing to hang instructors out to dry if that will save the school in a pinch.

Choice of words is crucial in forming attitude. Language reflects values and beliefs - the metaphors within which people are working - and language influences the selection of values as well. At NOLS there is a daily choice between language that reflects abstract, systematic thinking (NOLS as outdoor industry facility) and individual, humanistic thinking (NOLS as center for people to live their wilderness travel dreams). The boosters use abstract, corporate language, and most of the school goes along with them. There is certain appeal to referring to wilderness travelers as "users" of a "resource." The wilderness lover thinks, "Wow: This is like a real job!" But it gets old soon. Like PCB pollution, the detrimental effects of calling an alpine valley a "classroom" or a conversation with an old trapper "curriculum" are slow to show up, but take a long time to disappear.

Choice of language can make the difference between putting NOLS in a dull boat, where the best that can be achieved are "satisfied students," or an interesting boat, where the best courses "changed my life!" It can define the level of respect for potential students: does NOLS "market" its courses, or "make information available?" It can reveal an underlying motivation: does NOLS seek to "limit its liability" or "do what is best for the students?" It shows where the school's heart is: does one "go out in the field" or "go out to town?"

The Mission Statement offers no useful limits to the boosters. The Mission Statement (39) is a parody of significant guidance. It enjoins the school to be a "leader" without saying why - no higher goal is described. Consequently it can be used to justify doing anything that might make NOLS a leader - there are no limits. In particular, it places a high priority on the survival of the school, never admitting that there could be times when it would be better for the land if the school ran fewer courses. It does not speak of allegiance to the greater outdoor community, the sacred earth, nor social values. It does not present the NOLS community as a priority in itself. It is just a mandate for growth.

The flimsiness of the Mission Statement is highly significant as it is used universally by administrators to justify their actions. If the Mission Statement read something like, "To be the leader... in order to promote reduced consumption, reduced development, personal responsibility, freedom and humility, a reverence for nature and a healthier populace...", then NOLS would have something real to measure its new ideas against.

NOLS is ceasing to act like a non-profit. Non-profits are known by their service to a certain community, and their goal of promoting the general well-being of society. (Think of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, AMFAR or Amnesty International.) With its emphasis on its own success, growth, notoriety, and prestige, NOLS is acting more and more like a for-profit. Granted, it can never distribute its profits to "owners" - and this is the technical definition of non-profit - but in spirit NOLS is no longer acting in service, and instead is acting in its own self-interest. Significantly, Canada refused NOLS a tax-exempt status because the school appeared to be simply transacting business and did not appear to be working for the greater good of society.

Instructor morale is dropping. Instructors will do hard work for almost no money if they are proud of the organization and what it stands for. But NOLS has become a place to gripe about rather than be proud of. Resisting the onslaught of administrative pretense and ignoring the increasingly corporate values of the school is an extremely wearing experience. Administrative self-deception deceives no one but themselves: NOLS is beginning to appear foolish to the outdoor community. And after watching coherent instructor concerns go unaddressed for ten years, it is no wonder that instructors are fed up.

It is not fun. Instructors are ill-poised to resist the onslaught because they are divided up and out of communication with each other, busy running courses. Meanwhile the front office team is not only together in the same town, but electronically wired together and with time on its hands. Countering administrative initiatives on instructors' own time in town gets old fast. Branches are similarly dogged by Lander in that they cannot give the necessary time to holding the boosters in check: they have more important tasks in front of them.

NOLS is now less of a secure place to work. In a conflict between a student's family and the school, it seems clear that the school will hang the instructor out to dry if it will help. Instead of receiving messages about how great they are, instructors get messages about how inadequate they are. Instead of specifying what kind of students they want, they are told to accept what they get if they want to keep their jobs. It's as if someone decided to really use that old joke, the DIM triangle of leadership (Deception, Intimidation, Manipulation), and run NOLS with it. I would predict that NOLS can expect a mass exodus of instructors if there arises an alternative program that's willing to honor the people who do the real work.

Smithers, British Columbia, January 1998

¹ A booster can easily be identified as someone who say there is no contradiction between these two priorities: increasing the prestige of the school and seeing to the welfare of its community. [back to text]

² Although it is tempting to describe these values as "wilderness values," it is unlikely that they proceed from wilderness itself. Wilderness is a complex entity which - like the Bible - can "prove" whatever point one desires to see therein. Wilderness has been used to prove the "natural rightness" of Aryan superiority as well as the "natural rightness" of welfare. But on the other hand when a sub-culture, such as the outdoor community upon which NOLS draws, consistently perceives a set of values to be embodied in wilderness, then in a practical sense for those people the values can be thought of as "wilderness values." The fact that the values actually originate with the audience - and then are perceived by being unconsciously projected onto wilderness - is interesting but relatively academic. [back to text]

³ John Gans has told me that the idea "a leader is humble" makes no sense to him. [back to text]

⁴ This serious make-up job is exactly what the boosters intend. [back to text]

⁵ In fact in a surprisingly self-revealing statement of the booster agenda, the 1988 catalogue states "NOLS has grown from a little funky outdoor school operating in one mountain range, to a world-wide, highly regarded leader in an industry that is still growing." [back to text]

⁶ I am not arguing that those things belonged on NOLS courses: I am arguing that there was a question that was never asked:"What are the elements of outdoor culture that suggest the presence of these things within wilderness education is appropriate?" [back to text]

⁷ Consider for example the serious discussion at NOLS over whether there are negative consequence of leaving a single grain of rice behind. Like the early Christian debates over whether Christ was both divine and human, trivial points without practical application still have huge symbolic value to the "faithful." [back to text]

⁸ People at NOLS may not be aware of using metaphors to guide their strategic decisions. But organizations that do what NOLS does are so rare that people commonly seek out a precedent from other walks of life. When they want to fund-raise, they ask themselves how a "school" would do it, or when they are trying to decide how much to pay their instructors they ask themselves how a "business" would answer this question. The use of metaphors is inevitable until the front office decides to pursue a vision for NOLS based solely on its own character. [back to text]

⁹ This metaphor's correct identification of the Instructors Course as an audition is very valuable. Presentation of the IC as a "learning experience" (one of the many disinformation campaigns at NOLS of which I was a part) is an example of how NOLS double-crosses and confuses itself. The IC is no doubt a learning experience, but no one who has a significant amount to learn does very well on an IC. [back to text]

¹⁰ The best management technique with creative artists is characterized as "Get out of the way." This is exactly what NOLS instructors have been asking for. [back to text]

¹¹ This can be seen in the larger context as a local manifestation of the same craze whereby hospitals are calling their patients "clients," and universities are terming education their "product." [back to text]

¹² The task of holding onto their new identity is the most challenging task students face after NOLS courses - particularly for women. It would be a valuable use of the alumni department to support them in this. [back to text]

¹³ Elitism implies "better than others." Exclusivity implies "open only to a few." I have always found NOLS to be exclusive rather than elitist, although its darker side displays some elitism. An example of elitism would be when instructors act as though in-town employees are not interesting people. [back to text]

¹⁴ I refrain from using the terms "staff" or "employees" for instructors. Both of these words make misleading suggestions about the nature of instructing at NOLS. "Staff" is a term borrowed from youth-at-risk work and therapeutic contexts, implying a high professional wall between staff and clients. "Employee" of course defines the instructor in terms of the employer/employee relationship, highlighting the fact that s/he works for someone else, a fact which is barely relevant when discussing a work whose most distinguishing attribute is its self-motivated nature. [back to text]

¹⁵ In my opinion, when an instructor loses interest in the students, it’s time to leave the field. [back to text]

¹⁶ The reader may sagely say, "That doesn't sound healthy." I would agree - if one thinks of instructing as a job. If thought of as a mission or a calling, there are many precedents that suggest that this can be a normal and healthy phase of life. [back to text]

¹⁷ Although I have already identified the many shortcomings of the "school" metaphor I continue to use it for the sake of variety. [back to text]

¹⁸ Now both commitment and trust are falling off. Some would claim that instructors first broke the cycle of commitment and trust by being untrustworthy. It seems much more likely however that the corporate model discouraged any nebulous and potentially messy "commitment" between institution and worker that went beyond the "contracts" that govern individual courses. Any other kind of "commitment" might be unprofessional and legally ambiguous. I think it is fair to say that, in the corporate model, trust is considered a weakness. [back to text]

¹⁹ It is a persistent piece of disinformation that all students want an evaluation, and that the written evaluation somehow helps them grow as outdoor leaders. [back to text]

²⁰ The front office perennially harps upon the spelling and style of written evals - aspects about which the students do not care. This suggests that the office sees evals in yet another light, as a sort of PR, a posting to the world whose content is irrelevant but whose form bears the message that NOLS is professional. [back to text]

²¹ This is a good illustration of how the corporate model boxes the school in and limits it in effectively running an innovative outdoor program. Evaluations would be better if written two weeks after the course ended, but to do so would require the school to acknowledge some kind of relationship to the instructor that persists even after the contract ends. [back to text]

²² This will fail, because their model is wrong. Rather than there being a few bad apples in the bunch, each of us is a stupid apple every now and then. You and I look equally good on the course prior to the course on which one of us makes a big judgement error. [back to text]

²³ This is also a frightening irony, and if fully faced would probably incline the organisation into a profound and fruitful re-evaluation of what it is all about. [back to text]

²⁴ In my mind this is the single most ironic element at NOLS. Right at the point of potential first contact the school puts a frustrating, automated, impersonal voice mail system that says "Red Flag!" to any outdoor person seeking kindred spirits. NOLS could not send a more inappropriate message if they put a picture of office cubicles on the front of the catalogue. [back to text]

²⁵ They also suggest that the audience to impress is the non-outdoors public. This can only turn off NOLS's real audience, the outdoor community. [back to text]

²⁶ The rationalization that the difficult student is usually justified as an opportunity for the other students to "practice their EB" is a sad commentary on the way NOLS devalues their real audience (good students) in order to avoid selective admissions. [back to text]

²⁷ These are all "prestigious" elements and would no doubt be assets for something as conventional as a private school or college. But NOLS is only a private school in the most surficial sense, and these enthusiastic attempts to acquire status symbols simply proclaim that something is wrong at NOLS. [back to text]

²⁸ Taking this stand increases the prestige of the administration, but opens it to blame if anything goes wrong. In this light it is surprising that they have chosen to push through the difficult process of actually determining what goes on in the field and regulating it, rather than the simpler solution of referring all questions about field practices straight to instructors. This suggests that the hunger for prestige is high. [back to text]

²⁹ Low pay for all at NOLS is consistent with the school's non-material values. I believe that pay was never an issue until increasing pretentiousness on the part of the school's boosters reduced the pride people felt in the organization. [back to text]

³⁰ Drew Leemon's reply in the August 1997 Newsletter to Michele Escudero's allegation that instructors are no longer trusted illustrates this.

In other words, he does not feel it is safe to generalize his trust from this instructor, whom he has met, to instructors in general. [back to text]

³¹ There is also a downward spiral here. To defend against potential lawsuits, the school must develop better Assumption of Risk forms, and appraise instructors about how to write a log that will look good in court. This behavior suggests NOLS has something to cover up, and hence invites more lawsuits. [back to text]

³² Outside Magazine, which I dislike for its openly consumerist values (they seem to see wilderness as a kind of combination outdoor gymnasium and singles bar) in fact provides a very appealing partner for boosterism. Its essential idea is that wilderness is a resource from which it can make money (and fame), and to the integrity of which it has no particular commitment. This is no different from the philosophy of a logging or mining company. [back to text]

³³ The other two opportunities - course descriptions (CD's) and phone conversations with admissions officers - are also under pressure to downplay the tough aspects of NOLS. CD's are now supposed to be reduced to fit on one page. That leaves admissions officers as the primary channel for communicating the tone of NOLS, and they have to compete with the written documents to establish what is real. [back to text]

³⁴ For example, I participated in starting a new branch despite my awareness that this was the opposite of what the school needed. [back to text]

³⁵ My own experience is illustrative. I wanted to spend more time with my girlfriend/wife, I no longer felt physically able to work courses, and my mother became ill. All of these changes came as a surprise to me. [back to text]

³⁶ They also seem to develop a strange tendency to get a charge out of interacting with, winning favour from, and imitating institutions. [back to text]

³⁷ I actually once heard a board member say the world would be a better place if everyone took a NOLS course. And most everyone has been exposed to the implausible idea that Leave No Trace is "a way to save the world." [back to text]

³⁸ John Gans says that he believes that the future of wilderness now depends on the continued existence of wilderness education. [back to text]

³⁹ The fact that NOLS has a "Mission Statement" at all is lamentable. The mission of NOLS is obvious to those who work with its students, and any attempt to spell it out must either be an academic exercise or an attempt to pretend that the mission is other than it is. [back to text]