Happy Halloween

Another Halloween, but not much to say this year as I've already written about it a couple of times.  But as I see the costumes this year (Does anybody make their own costume anymore?), it makes me think about the costumes I wear almost every day, as do many people.

Each night/morning I take a gander at the emails before I start getting ready for work.  I answer the important ones and leave the others for when I get into work, but I also look at my calendar to see what appointments I have.  This tells me what I should wear to work.  Yes, I look out the window to see the weather, try and guess how broken the HVAC system will be in the office, but really focus on whom I'm likely to see that day.  Perhaps oddly, other than no meetings, which rarely happens, the lowest fashion priority is for meeting with faculty.  Business faculty, with the exception of economists, of course, are pretty good dressers compared to the rest of the college, but that is a pretty low bar, as college faculty are not exactly known for being fashion forward. The Arts and Sciences (a cheap sports coat with jeans is "formal") and Social Work (hush puppies and peasant dresses) faculty are probably the worst, with education (clothes older than the students) not far behind.  Professional schools do a little better, usually coming in around "bargain-bin business casual," more or less. Of course I'm exaggerating in the vain attempt to be mildly amusing, but in general faculty do tend to live up, or perhaps more accurately live down, to our refugee-fashion stereotypes.

There is a lot of difference of opinion about the importance and meaning of wardrobe for faculty, but most professors do give it some thought. For example, many professors try to connote images about the course and themselves to students through dress.  Those desired images might be, "I'm approachable," "I'm serious about this class/my job," or any number of "non-verbal messages."  Students unquestionably respond to these cues.

Faculty also react to their "corporate climate" in using their colleagues as reference points.  You usually don't see a faculty member wearing torn jeans, a tee shirt, and flip-flops (unless it's the old guy with long, gray hair and the Grateful Dead shirt) if everyone else is in suits, and vice-versa.  While there is a lot of conformity, there are those who delight in non-conformity.  Just as so many artists try way too hard to project an image of the "artiste," so too do many academics work at cultivating the image of the iconoclast.  Of course, academia does tend to be a haven for some rather odd ducks anyway.

Faculty dress for success doesn't work in the usual dress-for-the-job-you-want-to-have manner. In business, the farther up the hierarchy, the better the dress, but in academia, the higher the faculty rank, the poorer the dress.  In other words, it depends on what side of the Great Divide (tenure) one is on.  In working towards tenure, dress like everyone else, or maybe a touch above, but with tenure, do what you want.  Adjuncts (the great unwashed) just want to keep their abusive jobs (or sometimes suffer from the delusion that they may be hired full-time, which is, sadly, usually just a pipe-dream if you don't have a doctorate), and ironically typically are the best dressers.  Perhaps this is simply because they're coming from work at real jobs, or more simply aren't members of the nerd class that so many of us faculty members are.

Oh look, three meetings tomorrow.  Better wear an ill-fitting suit.