http://thisweek.chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i17/17b02401.htm
http://thisweek.chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i17/17b02401.htm
By JAY PARINI
Long after we've forgotten what our professors told us in college, we remember what they
wore. Attire has its own syntax and vocabulary, and it says both more and less than seems
apparent.
I remember, for example, the impression one English professor made on me in my freshman
year at Lafayette College: He wore frayed and faded jeans to class, with a blue work
shirt. On his feet were a pair of battered sneakers. It was a look that, in the mid-'60s,
was both startling and exciting. Here, I thought, was a rebel -- someone who identified
with the workers of the world. I also noticed that this professor always managed to find
the countermeasures in any text, to isolate the subtle ways that authors undermined
authority in their work, sometimes unconsciously. (It was deconstruction before
Deconstruction.)
Another professor, an American historian, also caught my attention. He invariably wore an
expensive suit with a matching vest. A gold watch chain was draped across his stomach, and
his shirts were starched white, with old-fashioned collars. He seemed to have issued from
a period when gentlemen were really gentlemen, and he spoke with an easy authority about
the past and represented (to me, at 18) the establishment at its best. Once, he invited me
to his house for tea and caught me looking at a picture of Benjamin Franklin on the wall.
"Ah, Franklin," he said. "He was my wife's distant relation." Somehow,
it didn't surprise me.
Wishing to become a professor myself one day, I became a close reader of academic clothing
-- and of the scholarly approaches and ideological affiliations of my teachers. Half
consciously, I learned to tailor my own presentation (in papers and exams) to their
fashions. Professor Blue Jeans would approve something that began: "Walt Whitman sang
his own body electric, sinking his tongue and fingers into the sensual crevices of
reality." Professor Three Piece might prefer: "The foundations of American
democracy were laid by a vigorous mercantile class, who resisted all attempts to impose
limits on what struck them as their right to free trade."
Students tend, consciously or not, to respond to the expectations of their teachers. By
definition in an experimental phase of their lives, they try on a pose, an ideology, a
stance toward the world as they shift from professor to professor, from discipline to
discipline. Eventually, they develop a style of their own, assembled from the haberdashery
of their education.
When I went off to the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland (a junior year that
lengthened into half a dozen in Britain), I found my ability to read the dress of my
teachers severely challenged by the British class system. In due course, however, I began
to understand the sartorial texts before me. While most lecturers (as in the United
States, my teachers were all men) clung to traditional notions of dress, a few were
clearly at odds with the system in some form.
My British-history tutor was an older man who was a member of the Fabian Society, a group
of leftleaning activists and pamphleteers that had famously numbered Bernard Shaw among
its ranks, and he identified with the labor movement. But he had also come to university
teaching through the army and Oxford, and he was never going to stray too far from the
traditional tweed jacket. So his sartorial rebellions were slight: He wore jeans, for
example, when giving tutorials. His shirts were frayed at the cuffs and collars, and his
ties were a living memorial to hundreds of splattered meals. The jackets themselves, made
of tweed that resembled strands of iron, not wool, looked indestructible. He told us that
he'd picked up one jacket at Oxfam, as if to say: "I am not giving in to fashion. I
am not a consumer."
There was another version of that style, from the other side of the political spectrum. My
tutor in medieval history wore iron tweed jackets as well, but his ties proclaimed
affiliations with various old schools and colleges. (That, more than 30 years later, I
remember he had attended Harrow and then Trinity College, Cambridge, suggests his care in
letting me know his academic pedigree.) He owned the most solidly built shoes I'd ever
seen: richly polished brogues. His trousers were corduroy, hugely ridged, auburn or deep
green in color. He often wore a checkered vest under the tweed jackets. On his pinky was a
gold signet ring -- a sign of family distinction, real or imagined.
I recall fondly a photograph of Bertrand Russell -- a hero of mine -- that I kept over my
bed at St. Andrews. In it, the great philosopher (also a peer of the realm), wore one of
those heavy English suits that declare a certain belief in tradition: a three-piece
navy-blue suit with chalk stripes. Although Russell was a leading voice on the political
left, his attire seemed to emphasize his ties to traditional British society. I always
felt it was savvy of him to speak his outsider views from the inside.
In the early '70s, I attended lectures by Sir Isaiah Berlin, whom I would visit in his
rooms at All Souls College, Oxford. He, like Russell, favored traditional pinstriped or
dark suits. His formal black shoes were always polished to a high sheen, and he liked
elegant silk ties. Coming from a family of Jewish immigrants, his place in the pecking
order of British society had once been unstable, although he soon became a firm pillar of
the establishment. Though he identified with liberalism, unlike Russell, he rarely
dissented in a public way from what might be called normative opinion. His dress was, to a
degree, defensive, his clothes signaling a strong desire to be regarded as a man whose
authority was based on his classical education, his fine intelligence, and his genuine
intellectual achievements; they also linked him, via pinstripe, to the world of bankers,
lawyers, and members of Parliament.
The British can also, of course, appreciate and encourage eccentricity. Several dons whom
I knew looked like the male equivalent of bag ladies, though they vaguely adhered to the
jacket-and-tie tradition. Their clothes were unkempt, smelly, and ill-fitting. One tutor
of mine would stuff his pockets full of olives at cocktail parties, pulling them out one
by one during tutorials, munching on the fuzzy balls unconsciously as he chatted about
Keats or Shelley. There was no particular political statement that I could read there.
Perhaps the disheveled look was just a way of saying: "I am an intellectual, deeply
concerned with serious matters, and fashion bores me."
When a tie was missing, it was noticeable. One of the most famous literary critics of the
mid-20th century -- F.R. Leavis -- had made a name for himself by refusing to wear a tie
at Cambridge. He had identified with the political left, as one might expect of a tieless
man in those days; yet, a ruthless intellectual snob, he had also wanted to stand apart
from the mob. His dust-jacket photographs haunted me: the fierce gaze, the open neck, the
high forehead. The intellectual isolation that he signaled echoed that of another
Cambridge figure of a slightly earlier era, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose casual dress -- no
tie, of course -- combined with an austerity of manner that frightened and intimidated a
whole generation of students.
When, in the mid-'70s, I came back to the United States to assume a teaching position at
Dartmouth College, I had to learn a whole new code of academic dress. Most of the
professors, most of them still men, wore leather hiking boots, casual trousers, and plaid
shirts. One got the sense that, after class, they might mow a field or repair a fence.
Finding an appropriate style of classroom dress for myself proved difficult. I missed the
world of British academe and wanted to associate myself with the legacy of Russell and
Berlin. My first major purchase in the line of clothing was a pinstriped suit with a
matching vest. I wore that for about two months, until one day a student asked, without
malice, "Professor Parini, why do you always dress like a banker?" Had he missed
the allusion to Russell and Berlin? I tipped briefly toward the preppy mode, with
Oxford-cloth shirts, blue blazers, khaki pants, penny loafers. But that felt inauthentic,
and I stepped into jeans and casual shirts (but rarely hiking boots); I often wore a tweed
jacket, but without the tie.
Several decades later, I find myself shifting among various personas with regard to dress.
Sometimes I want to feel my connection to the '60s, to the radical politics that had
inspired me as a student. I wear jeans on those days, and sometimes even dig an old blue
work shirt from the closet. I also have a few billowing shirts, which I wear when I
lecture on Walt Whitman. When I teach T.S. Eliot, I turn more formal in attire. Eliot,
after all, was a London publisher who favored traditional suits with a bowler hat and
rolled umbrella as accessories. By and large, I find myself most comfortable in something
from L.L. Bean.
To a degree, a professor's academic field dictates style. I've noticed that scientists
here at Middlebury College are casually dressed -- a tie might get singed over the Bunsen
burner. Foreign-language teachers, especially those with a European connection, seem to
think of themselves as on the streets of Paris or Rome, even though they are living in a
state where the cow population is larger than the human one. They often wear elegant
fabrics, and -- the women especially -- are frequently dressed extremely well. In the arts
and social sciences, one sees a mixture of tweed, jeans, and casual shirts on the men;
casual suits or skirts and blouses on the women.
Teaching is, after all, a performance art, and, whether or not we want to believe it,
we're putting on a costume of sorts every day. We're sending countless messages, explicit
and implicit, to our students, who are reading us as closely as they read the texts we
assign; they (only partly consciously, I suspect) find clues to our attitudes toward the
world, even our politics, in the styles we assume, and they often respond in their own
personal ways: in their own dress, in the manner of their prose on papers, in how they
picture the world of academics. It pays to think of clothing as a rhetorical choice, and
to dress accordingly.
Jay Parini is a professor of English at Middlebury College. His novel The
Apprentice Lover will be published in March by HarperCollins.
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