In a recent letter to students, Tuskegee University in Alabama outlined several new policies set to go into effect in the coming school year. Cellphones are to be turned off during class, the school warned, and attendance will be tracked. But the change that received the most attention was the new dress code.
“Students are prohibited from wearing revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation,” Mark A. Brown, the university’s president, wrote. “They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets or durags to class or the cafeteria.”
In an interview, Brown said that his only aim with the new dress code was to give students a place to practice for life after graduation.
“The only need we feel is to prepare students to be successful: That’s it,” he said. Tuskegee has always believed, he added, that “we owe it our students to prepare them for whatever space they desire to go in.”
Black hair, and the items used to maintain it, are often policed by schools and other institutions. The N.F.L. and N.B.A. have barred players from wearing durags, which, like bonnets, are used to protect natural hair. UPS didn’t allow Black employees to wear their hair natural until 2020, and in 2018, a Black student athlete had his dreadlocks cut off in a high school gym in order to participate in a wrestling match.
But the restrictions can feel more pointed when handed down by a steward of Black life — in this case, one of the country’s most respected historically Black universities.
Brown, a Tuskegee graduate from the class of 1986, suggested that none of the expectations were new.
“The requirements of Tuskegee, a private historically Black college and university that’s been around for about 145 years, is that students adhere to the policies,” he said. “This is less about enforcement. It is about student success.”
The university has a strong record of improving its students’ economic prospects after graduation. According to an expansive 2017 study, one-third of Tuskegee students moved up two or more income quintiles; some 5.2 percent came from poor families but grew up to become rich adults.
Da’Zorah Pinckney, an incoming freshman, began to question what the dress code would mean for her mornings after she saw the note, which was sent to students on July 22. Nine days out from her move-in date, she wondered what she would wear to breakfast, or how long it would take her to get ready in the morning.
“I just wake up, I go get my food, I eat, I collect my thoughts, I get ready for my day,” Pinckney, 18, said on a break from packing up her belongings ahead of her first big move. “I don’t want to really be worried about changing.”
She was caught off guard by the note.
“I think setting a dress code for students who pay to go to school in general kind of shocked me,” she said, adding that she did not normally wear bonnets and pajamas to class while she was in high school. “Attending an H.B.C.U., I kind of knew that business casual was the standard.”
Taylor Wilson, 19, an animal and veterinary sciences major, will be starting her sophomore year at Tuskegee this month. When she received the memo explaining the new dress code, she mostly brushed it off, taking it to mean that the school was trying to prioritize professionalism in general.
“I was fine with that,” Wilson said. “But after I was seeing a little bit of stuff online, I went back and read the email, and that’s when I first saw the extent to which the university was taking it.”
The other new policies included one that prohibits the use of electronic devices in class except “when expressly authorized by the instructor,” and another introducing a penalty of a full letter grade reduction for four unexcused absences.
“I just feel like a lot of people saw all of that, but their only focus was on durags and bonnets,” Wilson said. “Overall, it was unnecessary for the university to put out the dress code because I just feel like there are much bigger problems at hand right now,” she added, alluding to disarray in the assignment of on-campus student housing as Tuskegee prepares to receive “a record number of new students.”
When Rayne Caldwell, 19, the sophomore class president, got the email on the new dress code, she was perplexed, she said.
“I know I personally can’t get anyone to even answer the phone to get my housing cleared, get my financial aid cleared or anything,” she said, “so when I saw the dress code, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, why are we focused on this?’”
Caldwell also suggested that even before the new dress code was announced, student attire was not an issue on campus.
“This is not a problem that Tuskegee University has ever had,” she said. “I’ve never seen anyone going to class in bonnets. I’ve not seen anyone doing anything that was unprofessional.”
The preoccupation with “professionalism” can be loaded, particularly when it comes to Black dress. Fitted caps, sagging pants and — as name-checked in the Tuskegee letter — “bedroom shoes” have frequently emerged as cultural lightning rods in discussions of respectability politics. In 2008, Barack Obama suggested that passing a law against sagging pants would be “a waste of time” but that Black men should avoid the trend out of “respect for other people.”
To Caldwell, the very suggestion that this rule needed to be put in place was somewhat insulting to the Tuskegee student body.
“I feel people took that as a little bit disrespectful — maybe a little ignorant even,” she said, adding that the university already had a strong “dress to impress” culture.
“It is such a nonissue,” she said. “It is quite the opposite of what people are saying it is.”
In her first year at Tuskegee, Wilson, the rising sophomore, participated in campus events, including one boasting “100 Men in Suits & 100 Women in Heels.” There is also “Fried Chicken Wednesday” and “Fried Fish Friday,” which invite students to put on their best outfits to share a meal in the cafeteria, she said.
“People don’t just walk around in pajamas and slippers and bonnets,” Wilson said.
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