AN ODDITY has hidden for nearly a century in a dusty bowl just east of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Deep Springs is a two-year college and, also, a cattle-and-alfalfa ranch. Its 26 students share duties irrigating fields and riding the herd, but also fixing boilers and scrubbing pots, alongside reading Nietzsche and swotting at their maths problems. They pay no tuition fees, and most finish their bachelor’s degrees at Harvard, Yale and the like.

And they are all male. The college has admitted no women as regular students since it was founded in 1917, in accordance with a trust established by Lucien Nunn, the tycoon who founded it as a place “for promising young men”. The atmosphere is intellectual, rugged and ascetic, and the college is a democratic body, where student-led committees decide admissions, hire the faculty and mind most matters of policy.

The big exception is over the question of co-education. Since the 1970s successive student bodies have lobbied to admit women, only to be rebuffed by the college’s trustees. Only recently, with the support of a newer tycoon from the class of 1980, have the co-ed supporters on the board felt able to press their case. In September 2011 they moved to make the change. Young women were invited to apply for the entering class of 2013.

On January 8th that plan stumbled. A county court rejected the trustees’ motion to reinterpret the college’s trust. A judge found that “young men” in fact means young men. More than 140 young women had applied by then, for perhaps only six places. They were summarily rejected.

Deep Springs is one of only four remaining (non-clerical) all-male colleges in America. Yet despite the prevalence of co-education these days, the trustees face a legal mess if they try to modify the terms of the trust. By all accounts, the place is flourishing as it is. That poses a difficulty for the trustees, and current students, who would claim that the founder’s intent is being thwarted by the all-male policy. If they cannot make that case quickly, Deep Springs will enter its second century in almost the same form in which it began.