Cosma Shalizi Criticizes One of the Sartorial Geniuses of Our Age

Cosma Shalizi is driven into shrill unholy madness by Inside Higher Ed the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Clothes Make Working for the Man Easier: I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen's op-ed "A Call for Professional Attire" referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find myself greatly irritated. Jensen says that contemporary American academics generally fail to dress up, in the modes that are supposed to reflect seriousness and status, and spends about 2000 words bemoaning this, long for a lost "golden age" (his phrase), and trying to ridicule, brow-beat, and shame his audience into complying with his wishes. The closest he comes, in all of this, to present an actual reason for doing so is saying this: "People generally act better when they're dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of civility, students will pick it up." This is backed up by a causal reflection on how " in DiMaggio's day ... [t]he men wore white shirts and ties under coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game."

This is a style of cultural commentary which drives me up the wall.... It is not that hard to think of an actual rationale for what Jensen wants; it would go something like this. (These are, of course, my words, not his.) "Academics are supposed to impart knowledge and skills to their students, to critique their work, to direct their intellectual and to some extent their moral development; in all these tasks they are supposed to exercise authority over students. They may also be called upon to supervise student or other employees, which is another exercise of authority. They will do so more effectively if they display the recognized external markers of high status and of seriousness, which includes dressing in certain ways and adopting certain demeanors. In fact, if they do this, their authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate, leading to fewer occasions on which it must be explicitly insisted upon and made into naked acts of domination. Furthermore, academics are often called upon to represent their schools and/or their scholarly communities to the outside world, and this, too, will be done more effectively if they dress in ways which their audiences take to convey seriousness."

This is a reasonable argument... [about] consequences... with empirical premises, and one susceptible to balancing --- how much extra effectiveness is the extra expense, hassle, infringement on personal choice, etc., of this mode of dress worth?... One could imagine a reasonable essay which... thought through the trade-offs.

Jensen... just wants to take his internalized... transparently parochial... [norms] and pretend that they are... universal laws.... This is by far the more common rhetorical mode when people try to criticize manners and customs, and it strikes me as deeply stupid... since it gives you no reason to believe that acting as the author wants will make things better...

A professor's clothes--supposed to lie somewhere on the spectrum between total nudity and the purple-red dress of a Byzantine emperor--need to serve four purposes:

1. To make the appropriate people envy, in an appropriate way, the professor's (actual or counterfactual) spouse.
2. To make the professor comfortable.
3. To make the students more willing and eager to learn.
4. To take a particular stand on the great debate between the courtier Lord Chesterfield on the one hand and the intellectual Samuel Johnson on the other, summed up in Johnson's remark that Chesterfield's fashion-centered advice to his illegitimate son taught the boy "the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master."

I will pass over (1) as requiring a knowledge of evolutionary biology and a working aesthetic sense--which disqualifies me on both counts. I will pass over (2) as requiring a knowledge of biological thermodynamics which I do not have, save to observe that the traditional tweedy professor male academic clothes are, from a thermodynamic point of view, appropriate only for some British or New England campus without effective central heating. But I will say:

With respect to (3):

• I have found that wearing my doctoral robe to class is counterproductive. It
  • is hot pink, and
  • leads my students to think that I may be crazy, or
  • am making fun of them, unless
    • the class is on the medieval university, or the middle ages more generally--then wearing the doctoral robe can be very effective at focusing the class
• I have found that running shorts and a t-shirt is also counterproductive. The students think that:
  • I was too self-absorbed to figure out it was time to leave the gym, or
  • I am too self-absorbed and eager to get to the gym
  • But Matt Rabin achieves great success with his tie-died t-shirts and shorts
    • Matt Rabin, however, won the Clark Medal
• I have found that wearing a suit and tie is very effective if done occasionally with non-math-oriented students. It tells them that I care because it shows that I have taken sufficient time to prepare and teach the class even though I am a busy person whose schedule requires meetings with:
  • some powerful political figure,
  • some powerful economic figure,
  • some powerful university administrative figure, or
  • some TV interviewer
• With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms
• And if done too often, a tie tells even non-math-oriented students that I am not focused enough on the life of the mind to be worth paying much attention to
• My National Journal "I won a budget battle" federal budget expert t-shirt and my 1993 Clintona administration "budget victory" t-shirt (awarded to all those who worked in Roger Altman's rapid-response room) are very effective with students interested in policy or politics
• Otherwise, there is no discernible pattern

With respect to (4):

• The most important signal of expertise that a professor can send is that he or she is so monomaniacally focused and on intellectual task as to be completely outside the normal status hierarchies
• Thus it is very important that their values and tastes appear visibly different from those of either the striving poor or the smug rich
• And the best way to do this, from a sartorial point of view, is to make it appear that the professor had better and more important things to think about than mere appearance while getting dressed that morning
  • There is a faction that thinks that the best way to appear to have had better and more important things to think about is to never care at all about appearance--so that whatever one thinks of is automatically more important than how one looks
  • There is another faction that thinks that true unconcern is too risky, and that one must utilize great art in appearing artless in one's dress
    • But systematic artful artlessness is an impossibility
    • Pulling things at random from one's closet may, however, come close

Comments

[foo]

my thesis advisor regularly (well, nearly regularly) wore mismatched-color socks, and was adamant that this was merely happenstance because he simply pulled blindly the socks he needed for the day. Still, he never seemed to tire of telling the stories of the students who were either surprised to see him wearing mismatched socks, or more tellingly, those who were surprised (disappointed) to discover him NOT wearing mismatched socks...

[Cosma]

For "Chronicle of Higher Education", read "Inside Higher Ed".

[Paul J. Reber]

I understand the concept, but can't bring myself to follow through. I have never gotten used to wearing a tie and I don't have to meet with any famous people (or tv interviewers) so I can blissfully avoid the whole suit/tie thing. Even if I have to wear a suit jacket of some sort, I've been working the whole "open collar" thing longer than Obama or Ahmadinejad, tyvm.

However, I have managed to get myself into the habit of wearing non-jeans, belt and a button-down shirt on teaching days now. I'm a bit young-looking, I think it helps the students realize I'm the professor by dressing differently than they do. I once thought I'd wear some sort of suit-coat/blazer to achieve his effect, but I haven't.

Otherwise it's jeans, a comfortable shirt, white socks (that can't be mismatched) and black sneakers that can be mistaken for real shoes at a distance. If somebody coming to meet with me is looking for cultural cues to status hierarchy, I'm doomed. I'll just wishfully pretend they are all coming to judge me based on the intellectual contribution of my ideas and let the chips fall where they may.

P.S. I think it's an odd universal that professors worry about their sartorial choices, attentiveness or otherwise. I suspect people outside academia likely find that amusing or silly.

[northwoods bryan]

One of the more hilarious blog posts I have read in a while. The coup de grace: the "moral philosophy" tag.

The less obvious of my physics professors would wear t-shirts that read "what part of [an unnecessarily complicated form of the Schrodinger wave equation] don't you understand?" But the far more intimidating ones would wear white tennis shoes with dark dress socks, Dockers pants, and tweed coats on a daily basis, and convincingly not even realize there was anything wrong with that, so absorbed were their minds on the higher profundities of the universe.

[Maynard Handley]

"People generally act better when they're dressed right."

Personally I've found that students act better when they're dressed PROPERLY, and that they tend to mock their peers or lecturers who can't speak properly.
(Yeah yeah yeah this is orthodox American usage or something. I can't help it; to my ears it sounds like a hick speaking.)

[Dennis]

Two things:

1) There are many interesting areas where the best way we know how to do something is at random -- randomly chosen error correcting codes, random expander graphs etc. have better parameters than all but recent deterministic constructions, so in some sense it's not surprising that random sartorial choices may also have good properties.

2) You're an economist; of course you don't spend enough time thinking about isomorphisms. But then, no non-mathematician does.

[Don Majors]

Consider the sniggers mocking Prof."Farmer Brad" in checkered pattern flannel shirt, denim dungarees and hiking boots. As for having mismatched socks ... "I have another pair exactly like these in my sock drawer!"

Can you stand it?

[Barkley Rosser]

Actually I have been amused at how much fuss has been made about this dress style bit recently. On several occasions I have heard it coming from physicists (this is what I get for fiddling around with econophysics too much), who sometimes express pride at their downdressing. This is often stated in contrast with economists, who are depicted as overdressing, alhtough this is far from always being the case, at least in academia (as Brad knows, in Washington they tend to wear suits). The first time I heard this expressed was some years ago in an AEA session on econophysics that had the physicist Doyne Farmer on with Benoit Mandelbrot and Blake LeBaron. Blake was in a proper suit; Mandelbrot was in a rather ill-fitting one (of course, he is actually a mathematician), while Doyne was in something much more casual, although actually somewhat dressy.

However, one time in Washington I saw the late Per Bak, another Santa Fe physicist, being in a roomm with a bunch of economists in suits, while he was in blue jeans and some open shirt. He made some snide speech about how the fact that he was not in a suit showed that he was smarter than everybody else. I am not kidding.

I think the downdressing of physicists was started by Einstein, and now it is almost de rigueur. But in academia, economists also tend to down dress, or at least not dress up. When I was in grad school at Wisconsin, I remember there was a first year grad student who thought for awhile that Arthur Goldberger, the highest paid faculty member on the campus, was a janitor because of the way he dressed and ambled around the hallways.

[otto]

Didn't Brad have a thing for pink shirts?

[Robert Waldmann]

How can you find such interesting things to say about clothes ?

My views are based on 4. The informal dress of professors is, in my view, a good thing as it shows that here the rules are different, that debates are to be settled by evidence and logic and not by rank.

I was just talking to two students who were complaining about the grades I gave them. This is a time in which "professorial authority" would be most welcome. Even after this experience, I very strongly believe that students here are much too reluctant to question professors.

Partly this is related to my ambivilant view about my profession (economics). Still I think that in some fields, professors can show that their claims are worthy of respect with evidence or mathematical proof and, in other fields, their views should be treated as opinions.

Now the prof's view of what, say, Hegel said, can be supported by what is written in the books (that is evidence in the history of thought).

Generally, I think that the usual hierarchies are necessary in organizations which must act in unison to do things (most of all in the military) and harmful in organizations which must critique critical criticisms (most of all universities).

My clothes have 2 social messages
1) I can convince you with evidence in spite of my clothes (or you shouldn't believe what I say)
2) I am not committing the misdemenor of indecent exposure.

[Robert Waldmann]

How can you find such interesting things to say about clothes ?

My views are based on 4. The informal dress of professors is, in my view, a good thing as it shows that here the rules are different, that debates are to be settled by evidence and logic and not by rank.

I was just talking to two students who were complaining about the grades I gave them. This is a time in which "professorial authority" would be most welcome. Even after this experience, I very strongly believe that students here are much too reluctant to question professors.

Partly this is related to my ambivilant view about my profession (economics). Still I think that in some fields, professors can show that their claims are worthy of respect with evidence or mathematical proof and, in other fields, their views should be treated as opinions.

Now the prof's view of what, say, Hegel said, can be supported by what is written in the books (that is evidence in the history of thought).

Generally, I think that the usual hierarchies are necessary in organizations which must act in unison to do things (most of all in the military) and harmful in organizations which must critique critical criticisms (most of all universities).

My clothes have 2 social messages
1) I can convince you with evidence in spite of my clothes (or you shouldn't believe what I say)
2) I am not committing the misdemenor of indecent exposure.

[Joe S.]

I'm surprised that Brad missed a bit of sartorial economic history.

For a long time, clothes were expensive, and good clothes a reliable indicator of social status. Then clothes became cheap, relative to Americans' earning power. This took place in the postwar era. Since anybody could wear a suit (cheap since the 1950's) or fur (cheap since the 1970's), it became an unreliable indicator of social status. Of course, there was still cheap and expensive clothing. But most folk with a Y chromosome couldn't tell the difference any more.

Cheap clothing therefore became slightly aristocratic, showing that its owner was sufficiently high-status to be free of corporate dress codes and the like. And who is more aristocratic than the modern professor? (Apart, of course, from some of their students.)

[northwoods bryan]

Okay, as far as essential tension in sartorial expectations assigned to professional role, there is no profession more conflicted than patent attorney, most of all one specializing in computing and software. Such a patent attorney is torn between two very different sartorial standards:

1. Attorneys in general are one of the most conservative and status-conscious communities with regard to clothing standards, for the same reason that attorneys pay out the nose for premium high-rise office space just to have a place to put some computers and desks and conference tables and filing cabinets; but,

2. Patent attorneys spend most of their time with and need to have the confidence of scientists, engineers, and programmers, whose first impression of a guy in a suit and tie is to categorize him as just a lawyer, as opposed to someone who might understand what they are talking about.

2.1 Add to this the fact that patent attorneys must have an education in the natural sciences, engineering, or programming, and their natural inclination tends to be toward the second view rather than the first.

One of my professors recalled being rebuked by a new employer in silicon valley after he made the mistake of wearing a suit and tie in front of a client. And I had the experience once of interviewing with a group of software patent attorneys who told me it was inappropriate for me to wear a suit and tie to the interview.

[Jim Leitzel]

What would Adam (Smith) say?: "The most perfect modesty and plainness, joined to as much negligence as is consistent with the respect due to the company, ought to be the chief characteristics of the behaviour of a private man. If ever he hopes to distinguish himself, it must be by more important virtues."

From TMS, I.III.20 ( http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html )

[save_the_rustbelt]

Professors who look like tramps don't exactly inspire confidence in higher education.

And an iron can be acquired at the dollar store for about $12. After the 50th washing, even permenant press needs a little touch up - or buy a new shirt even decade or so I suppose.

Neckties are probably unnecessary though, even for the accountants.

[JRossi]

Why don't you just ask your wife what you should wear? That's what I do. One of the main reasons to get married is get help with that kind of stuff.

[Joe S.]

My wife calls me "Lord Nerdren of Haband."

[Anna Haynes]

They did hot pink two years in a row?

Very different sartorial signaling situation in the (nonacademic) real world, I'm sorry to say. The same lack of style which marks one as a force to be reckoned with inside academia gets taken as evidence of mental deficiency outside.

The consequences can be surprising.

[piotr]

I heard a complaint from a female scientist that she has very hard time getting the right dress. Total informality of her male peers would make her look janitorial, office suite, secretarial. It is a bit easier in boondocks were I live, because to avoid looking like a janitor it is enough to have BMI under 30 (well, but if you have more?) and to avoid looking like a secretary it suffices to have some touch of style (or be a non-Caucasian).

As a man with BMI under 30 and with no tattoos on my arms I can avoid janitorial mistakes.

Thinking more carefully, now I recall one janitor wearing blue jeans and having a trim figure, as well as one female professor with those characteristics, but the latter has really high rank and does not have to bother. However, she took care to have spiffy furniture in her office.

[Oskar Shapley]

I start the semester dressed in a suit to inspire discipline. At the end of the semester it's mostly sweaters to inspire calmness.

[low-tech cyclist]

Brad: "With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms."

Dennis: "You're an economist; of course you don't spend enough time thinking about isomorphisms. But then, no non-mathematician does."

In my experience, mathematicians don't spend that much time thinking about isomorphisms.

Once that you've established that a pair of mathematical objects (rings, graphs, whatever) are isomorphic, that means they're algebraically/graph-theoretically/whatever the same; whatever you say about one is true about the other. Having settled that, you move on to more interesting questions.

Homomorphisms, on the other hand, are interesting.

[MoreGarbage]

About the person with the mismatched socks: This is why all of my socks are the same style. Why buy socks which *could* be mismatched, when it's just as easy to get a dozen perfectly matched pairs?

[northwoods bryan]

You see, admitting he doesn't spend enough time thinking about isomorphisms is just a more emphatic way of conceding that he doesn't spend enough time thinking about n-categories.

[Dennis]

low-tech cyclist: "In my experience, mathematicians don't spend that much time thinking about isomorphisms."

It is true that once you've established that two things are isomorphic you can move onto more interesting questions. On the other hand, establishing isomorphism or non-isomorphism of things to me counts as thinking about isomorphisms, and this absorbs simply heaps of mathematician time.

If you're sufficiently obscure, of course, you may also be very interested in *how good* your isomorphisms are. Naturality and uniqueness of isomorphsims are very important for the categorically inclined; if you care about algorithms, you may also want to know things about their efficiency. You could also worry about the properties of a *collection* of isomorphisms...

All of which is really to say that northwoods bryan has just a vastly better comment than this.

[Dave]

I don't agree that systematic artful artlessness is an impossibility. what's necessary is a series of artless details with relative valuations of artlessness, and the combination thereof with a total artlessness value greater than x but less than y (where less than x makes you square and greater than y makes you kooky). ideally the number of artless variables should be high while containing low but noticeable individual artless quotients - this transmits an effective sense of being above the sartorial restrictions of those who aren't above such mores, while not giving the impression that you're trying too hard.

[Marcus Sitz]

The hot young professor at the LSE in 1980 always wore pants of an appropriate length to display his bright striped socks.

The rumour amongst the first year grad students was that his wardrobe was designed by his attractive young wife, recently plucked from a previous vintage of grad students, to ward off imitators.

When game theorists mate...

[Noah]

As someone currently working and attending university, I always feel rather disrespected by sloppy, unkempt professors. Presentation does matter, because it shows how you feel about the people you're interacting with.
I don't turn in papers written on crumpled, coffee-stained paper, and I'd appreciate it if the profs didn't show up to their lectures looking as though they'd just rolled out of bed and dug some dirty clothes out of the hamper.

[Stephen M (Ethesis)]

The comments are as good as the post.

I'm still coping with office casual where I work, not sure I could make the move into dressing with an academic crowd.

[bane]

One thing that no-one has mentioned is that the male suit, particularly the lightweight suit, is a very impractical thing for what academics tend to do.

The jacket is generally light-weight enough that it both doesn't keep you warm in a cool-ish environment (eg, aircon office) when you're basically sitting at a desk and the jacket tends to accumulate wrinkles if you do anything other than stand up straight in it. Likewise, if you aren't completely vertical all a tie does is constantly need pulling out of the way. Finally, academics tend to be much more likely to cycle around, or at least dash around on foot around regions of campuses than the typical corporate American, both activities that don't really suit the smart, thin-soled leather shoe.

The final reason that I don't generally wear a suit is that I find I can look like "someone who's reasonably smart wearing casual clothes" quite well, whereas in a suit there are so many things like a crooked tie that can make me look scruffy.

[Dick Mulliken]

It is said that Thorstein Veblen slept in a coal bin (New York rents seemed unconscionably high) and wore the same suit he slept in all semester long. I understand that the students (as well as assorted faculty wives)thought quite highly of him nonetheless

[Dick Mulliken]

It is said that Thorstein Veblen slept in a coal bin (New York rents seemed unconscionably high) and wore the same suit he slept in all semester long. I understand that the students (as well as assorted faculty wives)thought quite highly of him nonetheless