Professor Dress
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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