Some British universities are reestablishing dress codes, forcing students to leave their unsightly Burberry caps and trainers at home.
Are college bound kids really incapable of parsing dress-code policies? Instead of signing their names, do they just make a series of Xs? And what does the “independent adjudicator for higher education” do anyway? Leaving these questions aside, this is surely a welcome development. Anyone who has set foot on a college campus in the last few years (decades?) knows the typical youth has a wardrobe consisting entirely of pajama-bottoms, t-shirts, and flip-flops. At Brown University, if my sources are to be trusted, students rarely wear anything at all. It hasn’t always been this way–not even in the late 1960s. Although the architects of the counter-culture would certainly prefer to erase all memory of their better-dressed peers, take a look at these photos of the 1968 riots at Columbia University. You’ll note there were a bunch of students even wearing ties.
