Looking Like a Professor

I walked into the second day of my summer-session course wearing my typical summer-session outfit: Birkenstock sandals, short pants, and a short-sleeved golf shirt. An adult student was sitting in the middle of the room, a woman who had not been at the first class.

“Are you the professor?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, setting my books down at the front of the room with authority.

“You don’t look like a professor,” she said, shaking her head in wonder.

While I was probably 10 years this woman’s junior, and while I also had not shaved in five days, I’m pretty sure she was referring to my outfit. In sharp contrast to me, she was wearing a white suit jacket and skirt, and a pink blouse. Her outfit emanated much more authority than mine. I can’t even guarantee that my shirt and shorts matched.

But her comment started me thinking about what it means to look like a professor, and about what our clothes communicate to our students.

Professors are both blessed and cursed with the lack of a standard uniform. That we have no dress code -- either of the coveralls-and-name-tag variety or of the suit-and-tie variety -- gives us a sartorial freedom that, unlike some of my colleagues, I’m not sure I enjoy all that much.

The colleagues who seem to take the most pleasure in our fashion freedom fall at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

On one end sit the sharp dressers -- the tailored, the natty, the formal, the chic. Male sharp dressers wear ties to class every day. The ties match the shirts, and the shirts are sometimes in bright, bold colors. They wear brown and black shoes; sometimes those shoes are shiny. The most extreme wear suits -- not khaki pants and a blue sports coat -- but actual suits, in which the pants and the coat have been cut from the same material.

I’m not quite as educated about the nature of the female sharp dressers, but they seem to wear things like scarves and pointy shoes. Suit jackets cross gender boundaries, so I see some of those on women as well.

I will confess that I wonder about the motivations of the sharp dressers. I wonder whether they use sharp dressing as a means to establish their authority with students: “Within these pointy shoes are contained the wisdom of the ages. The pointy shoes make me the boss.”

I’m tempted, too, to equate sharp dressing with teaching style. According to reports from his students, the sharpest-dressed faculty member I ever knew -- expensive suits hanging off a sculpted body -- presented his views forcefully in his humanities classes, in lecture form, and expected students to repeat those views back to him on papers and exams.

But I’m not prepared to stand behind that generalization. My brother, a political scientist at a Scottish university, has always worn a coat and tie to class. “Why do you dress up like that?” I asked him once. I knew it didn’t relate to his teaching; he runs a very interactive classroom, with plenty of discussion and argument. He’s also a nice, laid-back guy.

“I don’t know, “he said. “I like dressing up.”

Weirdo.

I’m slightly more prepared, just based on anecdotal evidence and personal observation, to stand behind the idea that faculty members at the other end of the spectrum -- the slobs -- generally run less authoritarian, more student-centered classes.

One of my current colleagues has the most casual dress code I have yet to encounter among the faculty. On baseball season’s opening day, he arrives in the classroom in a pair of shorts and his St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. He runs the least centralized classroom that I have ever seen: His students are usually writing in class, doing group work, or having discussions.

Almost all the other folks I know on campus who run that sort of classroom dress like my colleague -- let’s call it “extreme casual.” That’s not to say that some suits don’t run loose classrooms as well. But I haven’t seen too many instances of colleagues in shorts and T-shirts who lecture straight through their 75-minute classes, pounding the lectern and glowering menacingly at students.

Of course the extreme-casual dressers probably use their clothing choices to make the students feel more comfortable: Hey, says the outfit, I’m one of you guys. If it weren’t for all of these damned rules and regulations, I’d throw on my flip-flops and meet you over at the kegger. In the meantime, let’s shoot it about James Joyce.

And then there’s me. I like to think and act as if I’m above caring about something as mundane as fashion.

“I wear the clothes my wife buys for me,” I say when people ask. Such sartorial insouciance. Such high-minded disdain for the things of this world.

But if I look deep within my casually attired soul, I will confess that I do think about my clothes, and that -- probably like most others in this profession -- I expect that my outfits send specific signals to my students.

Let’s consider a typical Jim Lang outfit.

Boxer shorts. They don’t mean anything.

Shirts come in three basic varieties: button downs; golf shirts; rugby shirts. Sometimes a crew-neck sweater or a fleece. Mostly dark or dull colors -- blues, grays, greens -- with the occasional flash of red or orange; if the shirt has a pattern, it’s probably checked.

Pants are almost always jeans. I used to wear khaki pants on the first day of class, out of some unaccountable belief in the sanctity of that day. I gave that up last year. It’s all jeans, all the time, from here on out. I wear shorts only during the final day or two of classes, at the final exam, or in my summer courses -- New England doesn’t offer much else in the way of shorts weather.

I’m broadcasting some mixed messages here, deliberately so. The casual shirt and jeans let the students know that I’m not uptight. They can open up in the classroom, and I will welcome their contributions. The occasional button-down, collared shirt reminds them that I’m still giving out the grades. I know slightly more than they do about literature and writing. I’m not actually going to meet them at the kegger.

It may not be true that others match their wardrobe to their teaching style, but I seem to. I incorporate plenty of discussion and interactive exercises in my classroom, but I have a very carefully scripted lesson plan for each class. So while my classroom may resemble that of the casual dressers, the plan follows a script as detailed as that of the most controlling and authoritarian of lecturers. Mixed clothing style; mixed classroom style.

Of course, those are only the messages that I imagine my clothes are sending. What messages are the students getting? Perhaps this account of a casually dressed professor in Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons might be helpful:

“This morning,” Wolfe writes, from the perspective of his young female protagonist, "[the professor] had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up the summit of his forehead.”

I’m only 35, and I don’t wear glasses, but I am (mostly) bald and I do have hairy arms and legs that probably look a lot skinnier than I imagine them to be. I’d like to think that my students don’t see me as an old, bald 7-year-old, but I’m willing to accept that possibility.