Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter 2012 | Page 93

Professor Dress 89 the importance of casual attire in classrooms may increase. The necktie itself may already be archaic, and the marginal benefit of not wearing one may well hint at larger benefits to be had by dressing even (and ever) more casually. Contrary to the popular images on which I was reared and trained, and somewhere between navigating expectations and exploring academic freedom, I have come to learn that what generates a classroom environment conducive to learning is to dress not less like students, but perhaps more so. Rather than costuming as a player in the proverbial ivory tower, we should instead watch, if not follow, the fashion trends of our audience. Rather than simply teaching about popular culture, we should consider wearing it when we teach. California State University, Northridge Ellis Godard Notes 1. Federal Courts have been divided on many issues of teacher dress codes (Waggoner, 2008:120). Requirements that men wear neckties, for example, have been affirmed by one court as expressing the authority of an instructor (Blanchett, 1969) but rejected by another as infringing on a First Amendment right to groom as one desires (East Hartford, 1977). 2. One relatively ambitious study concluded that teaching assistants in “high professional dress” were associated with “student misbehaviors” being “less likely”—but the students self-reported their likelihood of misbehaving (Roach, 1997). 3 Attire for women is clearly more complicated, both pragmatically and culturally, than relatively simple choices such as whether or not to wear a tie (Gilman, 2002), and particularly for women in ethnic minorities (Huisman et al., 2005). Moreover, there may be circumstances in which formal attire for females is pedagogically advantageous (Chesler et al., 2007:16). However, multivariate analysis of extensive experimental conditions suggests differences not only in how each gender is evaluated based on their attire, but finds that those differences may be particularly pronounced when the genders of the evaluator and evaluated differ (Blouin et al., 1987). Recommendations for faculty attire may, thus, vary by the gender of the faculty, as well as by situational circumstances such as whether the students are unisex. Perhap 2