Dress in Academia

[Academic2]

Are you a current student or faculty member with experiences to share about dress on your campus? A past student with information about how people dressed way back when? Have an interest in the representation of academic dress in film and literature?

If you have any interest of any sort in how people dress or have dressed on college and university campuses, or in the role such dress has played in the history of the classic style, this is a thread for you.

Me

Before talking about why I think academia is a unique environment as far as dress is concerned and thus worthy of discussion, let me say a few words about my own academic background. The only reason I’m doing this is because one’s experience of academia will vary greatly depending upon where one is in the world, what discipline one is in, one’s age, and one’s position in the academic hierarchy. If I was a young English academic, for example, my story would be different.

I was born in the American northeast, and all of my degrees are from schools in that region: my bachelor's degree and my first master’s degree are from public universities; my second master’s degree and my Ph.D. are from one of the three Ivies. I don’t want to get too specific about my discipline, so I’ll simply say that my department is part of my university’s College of Arts and Sciences; it’s not a professional school like law, medicine, or business. I’ve taught at both public and private universities, and have been in my current position at an eastern US university for around 15 years. I have tenure. I’m a “baby boomer.”

In high school I dressed mostly ‘prep’ style (the high school version of ‘Ivy’); went through a bit of a countercultural period as an undergrad (fringed suede jackets, etc., about which we will speak no more …); casual academic style as a grad student (sport coat and a sweater most often unless I was teaching, in which case I put on a tie); odd jacket and trousers with OCBD and tie as a junior faculty member; these days mostly suits with spread collar shirt and tie.

That should suffice to allow you to put into context any observations I might offer.

Dress in Academia

I think a case can be made that the modern university (an environment I know much better than I know that of the smaller college) is a unique social organism. Even limiting consideration to students and faculty (excluding, that is, the large diverse category of ‘staff’ as they’re known in the U.S.), it’s like a small town where the youngest residents are 16 or 17 and the oldest are in their 90s. And, weirdly, it’s a town where everyone is engaged in more or less the same pursuit.

I happen to believe that there is always a social dimension to dress, and that dimension involves, amongst other things, cultural codes which communicate position in various hierarchies. And there are a great many hierarchies in this ‘town’: age; student v. faculty; if a student, undergraduate v. graduate; if a faculty member, tenured v. untenured; chronological age; rank; status within the discipline; and so on and so forth. One can look across my quadrangle and see an extraordinary variety of dress, all of it communicating (wittingly or not) information about the status and aspirations of the wearer.

Quite independently of all that, academia has contributed importantly to the evolution of classic style, by which I mean a historical lineage of dress which has its origins in England in the final decades of the 19th century. Think “Oxford bags,” “school ties,” the U.S. “Ivy style,” and so forth. And let’s not forget the British boarding school which, while not a university is modeled after the university; Eton, for example, gave us the ‘club’ collar.

So, talk to us.

Cheers,

Ac


Alerting the folk who responded positively to the idea of this thread when I first floated it elsewhere on the forum:

@heldentenor

@Notreknip

@bslo

@unbelragazzo

@Pb924

@Claghorn

@TweedyProf

@WhereNext

@SeaJen

 

[SeaJen]

Subscribed and will participate when back from vacation.

 

[unbelragazzo]



I was born in the American northeast, and all of my degrees are from schools in that region:  my bachelor's degree and my first master’s degree are from public universities; my second master’s degree and my Ph.D. are from one of the three Ivies.   I don’t want to get too specific about my discipline, so I’ll simply say that my department is part of my university’s College of Arts and Sciences; it’s not a professional school like law, medicine, or business.  I’ve taught at both public and private universities, and have been in my current position at an eastern US university for around 15 years.  I have tenure.   I’m a “baby boomer.”

Anybody who says this went to Princeton.

 

[SeaJen]

For sure.

Anybody who says this went to Princeton.

 

[archibaldleach]

Subscribed. I am only an academic in spirit, but find the topic interesting.

 

[Claghorn]

subscribed

 

[Roy Al]

Subscribed.

 

[MGoCrimson]

Inb4 sweatshirts and flip flops

 

[Cleav]

subscribed

 

[dopey]



Anybody who says this went to Princeton.

Princeton Law, with Conne.

 

[Academic2]

Quote:

Anybody who says this went to Princeton.

For sure.
Quote:

 

[Academic2]

On the effect of dress on the life of one associate professor at a small liberal arts college, here’s the close of William Pannapacker’s essay “The Year of Dressing Formally,” from The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 25, 2008. (Emphasis added, to relate this back to my initial post.)

“[...] I think my year of dressing formally was a worthwhile experiment. In general, professors at liberal-art colleges are encouraged to be nurturing. But I found that a higher level of formality improved my students' learning. My larger classes ran more smoothly. I had fewer disruptions, less chatter, more note-taking. I had fewer grade appeals, even though I graded more rigorously and made larger demands. I saw fewer bare feet, boxer shorts, bed hair, and pajama pants in my classrooms. E-mail messages to me almost invariably began with "Dear Professor" instead of "Hey."

And, in a weird way, being formal in the classroom made my less formal, sweater-clad self more effective in one-on-one meetings. The unexpected softness of my appearance in my office seemed to cause students to open up and speak more honestly of their difficulties and aspirations.

In the end, as nearly every writer on the subject advised with varying degrees of emphasis, the most important thing about clothing is contextual appropriateness, in addition to quality and fit. In an academic context, clothes are a complex negotiation -- a means of communication -- among students, faculty members, administrators, and staff. You want to find the mot juste without being too highfalutin.

Over the course of a year, I straightened the bent stick of my personal appearance by bending it in the other direction. And now I have come to rest somewhere between business casual and business formal: I have fewer clothes but the ones I do have are of higher quality, with better tailoring. Above all, when I dress, I pay careful attention to context, including my age, rank, and the nature of the task at hand, even if that means adjusting my clothes in the middle of the day -- like superman in a phone booth -- as I change from professor to counselor to administrator and back again.”


The full article can be found here, though you might need a subscription to read it.


http://chronicle.com/article/The-Year-of-Dressing-Formally/45940/

Cheers,

Ac

 

[heldentenor]

I read that piece shortly after it first appeared, and largely agree with one significant distinction. I think clothing is as much about presentation of self/one's taste as it is about speaking to an idiom. The impact of clothing on perceptions of status, style, intent, and ambition is an important consideration and (as I mentioned in a thread Clags started a while back) it limits some of what I wear. Yet I think academic life offers a pretty broad space for sartorial self-expression that amounts to more than just choosing one's "type" to conform to various relational hierarchies.

Beyond obvious stereotypes (elbow patches), are there certain garments/modes of dress that well-dressed academics wear more frequently than the well-dressed nonacademic population? I would have thought so when I got my Ph.D, but SF suggests not.

Ac2, thanks for putting this together.

 

[unbelragazzo]

Since this is the academic thread, I think every post should first go to @Academic2, who will then randomly choose three thread participants, who will (with or without reading the post, it doesn't matter) then demand that changes from the original writer, who will then resubmit his revised post to @Academic2, continuing this process until 1) everyone is satisfied 2) the author is dead, or 3) the author decides to put his post in another thread.

 

[Academic2]

Since this is the academic thread, I think every post should first go to @Academic2 , who will then randomly choose three thread participants, who will (with or without reading the post, it doesn't matter) then demand that changes from the original writer, who will then resubmit his revised post to @Academic2 , continuing this process until 1) everyone is satisfied 2) the author is dead, or 3) the author decides to put his post in another thread.

Cheers,

Ac