Humanities alum launches Deep Springs style college for women

At the Arete Project, located in the North Carolina mountains, cohorts of female students are invited to govern themselves.

In mid-June, a group of eighteen young women arrived on a makeshift campus in mountainous, rural North Carolina, thirty miles from the nearest interstate and a long hike from reliable cell-phone service. They made themselves as comfortable as possible in small, unheated, unfurnished cabins. Soon, they were cooking soups and stews from vegetables grown on the property. The members of the group, who mostly wore hiking boots, cargo shorts, and old T-shirts, were attendees of the Arete Project, a summer program launched four years ago to provide intellectually curious young women with an experience similar to the one offered at Deep Springs College, the experimental and highly romanticized school in the California desert, which was founded in 1917 with the goal of preparing young men for the vague and lofty goal of “a life of service to humanity.”

Like Deep Springs, the Arete Project offers an alternative to the standard model of American higher education, one defined by three “pillars”: physical labor, academics, and self-governance. Every class, or “cohort,” must determine, from the day the women arrive on campus, the rules by which they will live and work together. Students have minimal connection to the outside world; in the past, cohorts have restricted phone and Internet usage to brief periods or places on campus. No drugs or alcohol are permitted. A potent mix of practical training and idealism, this education is designed to imbue students with a “selfless devotion to world and humanity.”

As this year’s cohort settled in, some students realized that they’d forgotten to bring important items—one, a toothbrush; another, a notebook. The cohort was international—there were five Chinese students—and some, longing for their native foods, began ordering them on Amazon Prime. Soon, packages were arriving on campus, often delivered one cardboard box at a time, from a truck that had taken the winding, narrow NC-80 north into the mountains.

Several students objected to the Amazon Prime orders—some on environmental grounds, others because they were concerned that the deliveries were surfacing financial disparities between students. “We were thinking a lot about display of wealth and how to make this a space where people felt comfortable,” Noa Kattler Kupetz, a Barnard student who attended Arete this past summer, told me when I visited. Kattler Kupetz was one of the trio of students whom the group had selected as representatives to speak with me. She’d started her time at Arete with a long mane of dark-brown hair, which she’d gradually chopped and shaved off until, by the time we met, she was bald.

Students also felt that the deliveries would undermine the school’s ethos. “By limiting Amazon purchases, perhaps people would feel more present and rely on each other for stuff that they might not have,” Kattler Kupetz said. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we make our guidelines ones that feel sustainable, emotionally and mentally?’ ”

Still, Amazon and other online food-shopping services had undeniable benefits. Students were wary of offending their international peers by limiting their access to specific foods; and banning deliveries seemed to go against the more gentle, democratic nature of the program. “We’re really trying to work on not policing,” Kattler Kupetz said.

“I’ve been totally fascinated watching this play out,” Laura Marcus, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the Arete Project, told me on the first of my two days on campus. We were sitting at a picnic table before the students gathered for a dinner of homemade pizza at the nearby home of Tal Galton, an environmental specialist who serves as Arete’s labor coördinator. The Amazon Prime debate is exactly the sort of knotty challenge that the Arete education model uses as a teachable moment. The model, which has appealed to Marcus since she heard about Deep Springs, while doing a high-school study-abroad program in India, aims to show students how daunting it can be to build a democracy from the ground up, and how to consider one’s personal needs in relation to those of a group.

Marcus, a precocious and ambitious Indiana native, earned the grades and test scores to get into an Ivy League school, but craved something different. “I was tired of feeling like my education was centered around the polishing of the individual, but with no stakes,” she told me. Marcus was wearing a sensible button-up, her curly hair pulled into a low ponytail; she has a hardy, cheerful Midwestern energy and speaks in exacting sentences. Almost as soon as she heard about Deep Springs, she learned that it had only ever admitted men. The school’s founder, the polymath tycoon L. L. Nunn, was rapturous about what he described as “the voice of the desert” and disdainful of almost everything about society at the time, which included “sensual pleasure” and “girls.” “Gentlemen, for what came ye into the wilderness?” he wrote in a letter, in 1923. “Not for conventional scholastic training; not for ranch life; not to become proficient in commercial or professional pursuits for personal gain.” Despite its monastic, anti-capitalist underpinnings, Deep Springs has a foothold in the most conventionally prestigious realms of American society: most of its students, once they complete the two-year term, go on to finish their education at Ivy League schools. Emmy winners, prominent academics and politicians, and MacArthur geniuses make up a surprising proportion of its tiny pool of alumni.

Marcus went to Yale, but continued to think about Deep Springs. In the spring of 2010, she e-mailed the president of the school, David Neidorf, and told him that she planned to launch a version of Deep Springs for women. In fact, Deep Springs was already moving toward co-education. When, in 2011, the board for the trust that controls Deep Springs voted 7–2 in favor introducing female students to the school, Neidorf invited Marcus to visit the campus, and hired her soon after to help with the transition. Marcus and other Deep Springs faculty members were gearing up to interview finalists for admissions when a California judge granted an injunction to the two Deep Springs trustees who were insistent on upholding the school’s founding mission: to promote the education of “promising young men.” Crushed, Marcus and her colleagues set about notifying all of the female Deep Springs applicants of the news. Deep Springs alumni and faculty continued to fight to get women admitted, and they were eventually successful: in September, 2013, Deep Springs announced that it would welcome women into its 2018 class. But Marcus didn’t want to wait. In June, 2014, she welcomed the first cohort to Arete.

Arete’s campus is situated in the forty-family Celo Community, a small land trust in rural North Carolina primarily composed of artists and retired academics, which abides by its own taxation laws and governs by consensus. Local families must apply to join and, once accepted, must complete an eight-month trial membership. Members are expected to earn “a simple but adequate living,” to respect the land, and to raise at least a portion of the food they consume. It has a placid, rustic feel with a crunchy, eco-friendly sensibility, which makes it the ideal location for Arete.

The western mountain region of North Carolina is unusually chilly and damp, and on the morning I arrived, in the last week of the eight-week semester, it was raining. By 8 A.M., the designated kitchen crew had prepared breakfast—an assortment of oats, grains, and zucchini—as the young women chatted among themselves. This year’s cohort, like most of the previous years, was filled with undergraduates from private colleges like Oberlin, Brown, and Reed, along with a group of international students. Most had learned about Arete through friends, or through brothers and male friends who had gone to Deep Springs. All are cisgender and used the pronoun “she”; about half identify as queer. They are the type of young women whose conversation jumps effortlessly between Beyoncé and Iris Murdoch; who use often-mocked words like “safe space” and “experiential.” Much like Marcus herself, they’re the sort of brainy people who are both highly ambitious and analytical enough to question the nature of that ambition.

Breakfast was followed by three hours of labor. I watched as a group of students was dispatched to chop wood, while another set of women worked in the garden. The kitchen crew, meanwhile, busied themselves preparing lunch. Meal prep had initially been fraught. “At the beginning, nobody wanted to be in the kitchen,” Kattler Kupetz explained. “Maybe it was because there was this idea that we should be doing roles that didn’t feel like the typical gendered social roles.”

In many ways, Arete’s version of self-governance is more immersive than that at Deep Springs, where men have two years to formulate a way of life, and there’s a hierarchy between first- and second-year students. At Arete, the women have just eight weeks, a constraint that seems to have further shifted the focus of the group from academics to dissecting students’ behaviors. At one of the daily self-governance meetings, for example, the students decided that they would begin addressing one another, rather than just the professor, in class, to help encourage genuine engagement rather than intellectual peacocking. (Arete employs just one professor, Jennifer Keller, a former Deep Springs humanities teacher.) At another meeting, the international students said they were concerned that the Americans were too loud. Following experiments with silent breakfasts—which most felt were unsustainable and were troublingly playing into expectations that women should be quiet and subservient—the group came to the agreement that the naturally louder students would be more proactive in giving the quieter ones space and time to speak, and the quieter ones vowed to speak up more frequently.

Most of the students I spoke with confessed some self-consciousness about the vast amount of mental energy that was being devoted to seemingly mundane details. “Sometimes, the stuff we talk about in self-governance feels so small compared to what’s going on in the world,” Kattler Kupetz admitted. “But it’s refreshing to be in a space where there’s so much care that goes into every decision.”

I had expected to find at Arete the kind of rah-rah brand of female solidarity that has grown so commercially successful in recent years, bolstered by social media and the possibility of a female President of the United States. But most of the women I spoke to were less interested in being in a women-only environment than in a self-governing one. “We’re not doing this to prove to men—Oh, we can chop wood,” Kattler Kupetz said. When I asked Ruilin Fan, a thoughtful speaker who was raised in Beijing, whether her decision to apply to Arete came out of her time at Mount Holyoke, which is also women-only, she shook her head. “It’s a bit of a coincidence for me,” she said. We spoke during a block of free time before dinner, in a gazebo that had been constructed by a previous Arete class. (Meanwhile, in a communal bathroom across campus, a group of Fan’s classmates were attempting to dye their hair pink using locally sourced beet juice.)

In fact, the core aims of Arete run counter to today’s most common displays of gender equality, which often hinge on the idea that women should prioritize their own desires. Fan had applied to the program because, she said, “I wanted to stop thinking about myself all the time.” This is what I heard over and over again—that the churn of self-betterment, exacerbated by a never-ending digital feedback loop on social media, was becoming exhausting. “A lot of the people here are high achievers, however you want to define that . . . and we’ve realized how unfulfilling that is,” Kattler Kupetz told me. “We’re supposed to be the people who are doing it right, and we’re succeeding. But what is success if you feel incredibly alone, and the work you’re doing is so theoretical?”

When I asked Marcus how the philosophy of Arete might relate to the empowering messages of a book like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” she was taken aback. “I have given that question literally zero thought,” she said. “But I probably should be thinking about this space in relation to other women’s programs, and feminist programs.” She paused. “I don’t think that Arete is promulgating a specific vision of what it looks like to be a strong woman or empowered woman, or a leader,” she said. “That space is deliberately left open so students can grapple with that.” And yet Marcus also noticed that both Arete and Deep Springs, despite their attempts to subvert gender stereotypes, inadvertently end up reinforcing them. “For heaven’s sake, Deep Springs is a cattle ranch,” she said. “In that setting, it can be really difficult to get distance from the myth of American manhood.” Meanwhile, at Arete, she’s watched women try to navigate their own conditioning. “There’s this very strong compulsion among women to be nice to each other. And, frankly, I think that’s a good thing,” she said. “But I think there are times when their commitment to kindness makes it difficult to deal productively with the kind of conflict that arises naturally in these intense situations.”

By the final week of the term, the Amazon Prime debate had settled into a stalemate. Women were permitted to use the service, but only for food, with some exceptions for health-related items, as long as they used their own money, rather than the communal kitty. “I think the way it worked out wasn’t ideal, because we ended up eating different foods at different times,” Fan said. Meanwhile, there was plenty else on the agenda at the self-governance meeting on the Tuesday afternoon of the last week of the semester. One item was the new set of application questions for next summer’s class. Despite previous classes’ best efforts, last year’s application questions had yielded an Arete cohort that looked a lot like the student bodies these women were used to during the regular school year: mostly white or international students from élite colleges, with upper- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, all of them academically focussed on the social sciences or humanities. All of the black students who were accepted had chosen not to attend this year. Like most college-application committees, the group was keen on shifting the dynamic.

Splayed out on the pavement in a circle, the women began to discuss the application. Last year, the women had been prompted to list their five favorite books, or other pieces of “intellectual media,” which many of the women considered problematic.

“We don’t want to make people have to narrativize themselves into this résumé thing that they’re so used to doing,” Paige Parsons, a bubbly Brown student, said. “But I do want to know what people have done, and what they’ve read. Maybe we can pose it without being, like, ‘Impress me.’ ”

“I actually love that five-book question,” Huiqin Hu, a Wesleyan student, argued. “It’s the only question I was confident about answering.”

Emily Barr, a curly-haired and inquisitive Reed student, pushed back. “I think that can so quickly lead to an opportunity to show off,” she said. “I don’t care what people are thinking. I care what people are doing.”

Tabea Roschka, a German student studying at Sciences Po, in Paris, suggested that they ask instead for a list of five “favorite things” in non-hierarchical form.

This elicited nods from the group. But just as it seemed as if they were ready to move on, Parsons had an epiphany. “I think we’re really minimizing people by thinking that students of a lower economic status can’t talk about . . . books? Or ideas that have informed them?” she said. “Like, I think that’s crazy.”

Barr frowned. “I understand that most of you disagree with me, but I really dislike it.”

Juna Keehn, an Oberlin student and one of the designated facilitators of that meeting, reminded the group that it was almost time for class to start, and pleaded with them to wrap up the debate and summarize where they’d landed.

“What about if the question goes, ‘List three objects, places, people, books, or ideas that have influenced who you are’?” Anna Stonehocker, another Sciences Po student, proposed.

“I liked the books question,” Lucy Berman mumbled quietly, but loud enough for Barr to hear.

“But think about why you did,” Barr replied.

“Because I like to read,” Berman shot back with a light eye roll.

“O.K.,” Keehn chimed in. “Let’s focus.” They were about to be late for class, and were at risk of missing out on one of their favorite rituals: a daily dance party before lessons, created so that they would avoid exhibiting the body language of “tired people” during class. The moment of tension between Berman and Barr had dissipated, either out of distraction, a sense of conflict avoidance, or perhaps genuine warmth. “Dance party!” someone shouted, and the eighteen women leaped to their feet and scurried toward the classroom.