Tell Your College Women Friends About Arete!

The Arete Seminar has opened applications for it’s Summer 2015 program, and it seems pretty likely to me that I’ve either got readers who are interested or who know people who would be interested.  Here’s the basics:

The Arete Seminar provides an educational program for college-aged women that emphasizes democratic participation and leadership, sustainability, personal and communal responsibility, and intellectual excellence. It combines a top-tier liberal arts academic programming with a practical education in stewardship and citizenship, supported by the three pillars of academics, labor, and self-governance. All participants will be held to the ground rules: (a) isolation on campus, encouraging introspective and intensive engagement with the community and (b) a strict policy forbidding the use of drugs and alcohol. Apart from these foundational regulations – along with required engagement with the three pillars – the task of self-governance will see all participants active in creating and maintaining their own polity.

The Arete Seminar is inspired by Deep Springs college, the all-male, two-year program of 26 students studying and working on a ranch together.  Arete is a newer program (this is just its second summer) and the folks behind the project are looking for female college students to join them from June-August this summer. Here are some useful links, if any of the above sounds interesting to you:

• Arete’s application
• What to expect at Arete
• Last summer’s syllabus (the theme was “Built Life & the Written Self”)

Personally, I think this note under “What to expect… in terms of prior experience” is a pretty good way to identify women who should apply to Arete:

Some students will arrive at Arete with more relevant experience in academics, labor, or self-governance than others. Some students may have majors that provide them with a better foundation for the course; others may already know how to weld, cook, or lay irrigation; others may already have experience running meetings and organizing political bodies.

If you want to spend your summer with intellectually inquisitive women who span that gamut of skills/interests, get thee to the About page and then the application. Heck, that almost makes me sad that I’m too old to apply (except for the bit where I remember that this all takes place in nature — I don’t have a Franciscan temperament). So, send in an application or tip off a friend (the latter even counts as a Christmas present, if you calligraphically inscribe the url on fancy paper or something). And, just as an FYI for readers with younger kids, you might want to look into the Center for Talented Youth for the summer — it’s the best thing that happened to me before college.