Professors draw the line at looking like students

Deirdre Clemente has spent much of her academic career studying 20th century American culture, particularly fashion and clothing and how, and why, people dress as they do.

And while Clemente, an assistant history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, focused on college students in her 2014 book, “Dress Casual: How College Kids Redefined American Style,” it turns out that college professors may be dressing in some pretty particular ways, too.

That English professors may dress differently from law professors, or that history profs may dress differently from anthropology profs is something she has been observing for years, says Clemente, who’s also associate director of the public history program at UNLV.

For example, “I can always tell an anthropology professor, they have the Birkenstocks. You can sort of see that. And they sort of have a more crunchy, hippie way to dress,” she says.

History professors? “A mixed bag,” Clemente says, but generally on the casual end of the spectrum.

English professors? “On the East Coast, you can see a lot of English professors in tweed sport coats,” she says.

And law professors? “They dress much more professionally,” Clemente says, and, as a group, probably are “the best dressed on the UNLV campus.”

There is a practical side to all of this. Clemente notes, for instance, that law professors tend to deal with the public to a greater degree than, say, history professors, who work in a more self-contained world where dressing up isn’t as key.

Beyond that, the reason might be the same as you’d find in any other workplace, from auto body shop to office: People tend to take dress cues, either consciously or unconsciously, from their co-workers.

“A lot of it happens through regulation of the group within itself,” Clemente says.

It sounds reasonable to Michael Green, an associate professor of history at UNLV, who considers himself falling on the more casual side of the fashion spectrum.

“I do think there’s an impression, at least, that the faculty in business and hotel (colleges), having worked in that particular world, reflect what their colleagues wear to work. I have seen more business faculty or people who have been in business dressing a bit better than humanities types.”

Green has noticed a general acceptance of casual dress among professors across the UNLV campus. That, he says, could be “an outgrowth of the ’60s and expansion of who went to college, who taught and what was studied. And maybe you can trace it to the GI Bill after World War II.”

When Green began working at UNLV, he made it a point to dress up during the first few weeks of classes, even though it was August “and no sane human being wears a jacket and tie that time of year.

“A colleague took a look at me and said, ‘I hope this isn’t a trend.’ ”

“But you rarely see jackets and ties in the classroom much anymore, and I’ve had students come to class wearing jackets — they’re going on to a job or whatever — and you say, ‘Showing up the professor? Oh come on, now.’ ”

At the downright dressy side of the spectrum is John Bowers, an English professor at UNLV who specializes in medieval English literature, who Clemente considers one of UNLV’s best-dressed professors. He wears a coat and tie to class every day.

“I’m a Virginian and a traditionalist,” Bowers says. “Also, I think that it’s professional. I mean, if you hire a lawyer and he showed up in the courtroom in a T-shirt, would you think that you were being serviced professionally? So it’s the same sense of being a professional, and my teachers all wore suits and ties and so do I.”

Bowers has noticed administrators downshifting their traditional dress of dark suit and tie, too.

But even Bowers has his limits. “Back in the day when I used to teach summer school, I didn’t do a jacket and tie,” he says. “It was just too damned hot.”

For Green, classroom attire is a function of both strategy and comfort.

“I just feel that I should dress in a way that suggests I’m comfortable and want students to be comfortable,” he says. “But there’s still a line between the professor and the student.”

Which may be why you don’t see many faculty members in jeans. “I think you more often see Dockers,” Green notes.

And, for good or bad, students do notice what a professor wears.

“I once wore green pants for St. Patrick’s Day. Fairly hideous green pants, I might add,” Green says.

And, on the course evaluation form students filled out at the end of the semester, Green says, “one student wrote, ‘Lose the green pants.’ ”

Read more from John Przybys at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com and follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.