Aedh Wishes for the Tweed Jacket of the Academy

I admit that I saw this article a few days ago, did a double-take (to make sure that “Erik Jensen” wasn’t really Leon Kass), decided it was written half tongue-in-cheek, and didn’t pay it much more attention after that. 

Really, how can you take an article seriously that has parts like this?

B. The Sex Question

We have a sense of appropriate menswear — Jeffrey Hart wrote that “any male professor who comes to class without a jacket and tie should be regarded with extreme prejudice unless he has won a Nobel Prize” — but this isn’t a males-only profession anymore. Who’s to say how the Hart principle should apply to women?

Me.

Hilarious.  And then,

Faculty members shall, when on college grounds or on college business, dress in a way that would not embarrass their mothers, unless their mothers are under age 50 and are therefore likely to be immune to embarrassment from scruffy dressing, in which case faculty members shall dress in a way that would not embarrass my mother.

But I’ve seen my advisor give a lecture in a sweater that can only be described as startling, while his mother sat in the back of the lecture-hall.  She was focusing on her crossword and not on the blackboard (I guess she wasn’t as excited about dependent data-types as her son), but that still suggests the point: maybe embarrassment in front of one’s mother isn’t the only motivation in play here.

I think I’ve even written about this around here once or twice before.  For me, there’s an act of discipline and self-control involved in what I choose (and what I prepare) to wear each morning.  A jacket and a tie might be a bit much — then again, I’m not faculty either.  But to put on a pressed shirt and nice pants, a belt and shoes-that-are-not-sneakers, these are acts which say, “I intend to do serious work today.”  Or, “I will present myself as a serious person, to visitors from outside the lab.”  On such days, I also choose to print carefully in black-inked block-letters, on the pages of large unlined notebooks.  It’s a mind-set.

[Equivalently: if I, in the morning, tuck a pressed button-down shirt into some jeans, this is an outfit which says, "Perhaps I only intend to be half-serious, today."]

But I wouldn’t go writing articles in Insider Higher Ed about it, either.  Some people travel halfway around the world to give a talk in a large hooded sweatshirt.  Who’s to say that that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, work for them? Tread softly, for you tread on someone’s personal work-habits.