I was reading this thread about freshman beanies and started wondering if the tradition was a social one or if it was ever enshrined in official student conduct policies.
I know that some private religious schools such as Bob Jones University and Brigham Young University have dress codes that more or less apply all the time while you are on campus and possibly while you are off campus. I would also expect that military service academies such as West Point and the Naval Academy also have dress codes as students there are considered to be in the military and the military itself has dress code rules. Physical Education classes may have dress codes, but you only have to comply while participating in the class and can change as soon as you’re done. Occasionally there is a kerfuffle over dress codes at public schools (e.g. high school or elementary school) that leads to a First Amendment fuss over why Little Suzie the devout Catholic isn’t allowed to wear a rosary and shame on Principal Intolerant for passing the no-jewelry rule. Do any non-religious and non-military universities or colleges have day to day dress codes today? Are there any that had them in the past but no longer do? For example, did UCLA ever have minimum skirt lengths more restrictive than that required by local criminal indecent exposure laws? E.g. hemlines up to three inches above the knee were OK for walking around LA in general but the campus required one inch above the knee or less and students caught with a skirt two inches above the knee were subject to university discipline only but students caught with a skirt four inches above the knee were subject to university discipline and referred to local law enforcement for prosecution.
Community colleges are in scope.
Commencement and other special events are different. I’m talking about dress codes that apply to students sitting in math class, hanging out at the quad, or studying in the library.
De facto dress codes that are informally constructed and where violators are subject to pressure such as social shunning or ridicule but cannot be punished by official de jure proceedings in a formally constituted tribunal are not in scope.
I just perused the handbook for my university and it doesn’t say anything about dress codes. It does specify that members of the university community are expected to greet each other in the hallways and sidewalks which strikes me as both funny and well-prioritized.
My husband and I attended the same university 13 years apart. When he was an undergraduate (late '60s), women were not permitted to wear slacks to class. That had long since gone by the wayside by the time I was a student there.
I’m pretty sure anything you can legally wear in public (e.g., at the beach) you could wear on most campuses as you see fit. If it repeatedly caused disruption in a certain setting then it might lead to a talking-to just like any other disruption might, but that’s a different thing than having a dress code.
When I had my orientation for TAing at the start of grad school, they went through some scenarios that might come up. One is that a student might find your outfit distracting and will ask you to dress more conservatively in the future. The advice they gave was that you absolutely do not have to do anything in response to this. It’s their problem, not yours.
Well, that’s if a student does. If the police do (or if they merely decide it’s contrary to local law), that’s something else entirely.
(What you’d do if a professor mentioned something depends on your current GPA.)
So that’s the answer:
You can wear anything allowed by local law, with no special restrictions. This has likely been the case for more than 20 years now on most campuses the OP is interested in.
This is true at my public, university campus though we do have some restrictions with regards to what students wear during exams in the large lecture classes such a requirement that veiled students must briefly remove the veil in the presence of a same sex TA to confirm their identities. It is often joked that the air conditioning is kept so cold in most of our buildings so that students will be forced to wear shirts.
Beach-side communities commonly have (or maybe, once had?) specific public dress codes with different rules for dress at the beach versus elsewhere in town. Away from the beach, typical beachwear was not allowed. Note, this is not in the same league as public indecency laws. At the beach, you could wear bathing suits or skimpy bikinis, which did not expose any “private parts”. Yet the same attire would not be permitted downtown. Public beaches commonly had signs posted stating these rules.
Streaking became something of a fad in the early 1970’s (20 years before Andrew Martinez), and that seemed to include people (always male-type people) jogging nude around campus (the campus in question being U. C. Berkeley). I’m not aware of guys being busted for it. One fine day, I had a date (with a female-type person) that entailed going for a walk along a fire trail up in the hills above the campus, where we encountered a naked jogger. Per the ambient attitudes of the time and place, neither of us saw any problems with that.
A friend of mine suggested that naked joggers up in the hills were probably less disturbing to the resident wildlife than clothed people would be.
I have studied at, taught at, and visited numerous universities in my time, and have never heard of any of them having any rules whatsoever about how people should dress. When I was at Caltech, there was an elderly guy who used to hang out on campus, and quite often attend talks, and participate in the Q&A sessions, who always wore a sort of loincloth-cum-diaper thing, with his legs bare. I do not think he was a student or faculty member, but he was an accepted part of the campus community (somebody told me he was a former student who had made a lot of money from an invention). Nobody made any objections to his weird sartorial style.
This is at least the second thread started by Mr Columbia (the other, IIRC, was about punishing students for non-attendance in class) that seems to indicate that he thinks universities are, or should be, much like high school. They aren’t, and most people involved would agree that they shouldn’t be.
The only “dress code” I remember from college were safety requirements in the science labs. Well, the nursing students had uniforms for their clinicals. I don’t remember ever seeing a women in a face veil, headscarfs yes. One of my classmates was in the process of becoming a nun; she did wear a veil (apparently this amused the older nuns).
About the only instance of dress code I have encountered for students (apart from the obvious lab safety codes) has been for ward rounds in medical school. I know of at least one student who was bounced from a ward round for turning up in jeans and a t-shirt. Ties aren’t required, but button up shirts (for men) are, long trousers or skirt, and no jeans. I suspect that similar rules may be enforced for some of the legal students when involved in activities that involve interaction with the public. The dental school probably imposes similar rules as the medical school.
The one time when a dress code is rigorously enforced is at graduation. No academic gown, no degree. OTOH, they don’t enforce what is worn beneath, and bare feet, shorts and a t-shirt have been common, especially with mathematicians and physicists. Usually however, because the parents are in the audience students that you could have never imagined out of shorts and t-shirt suddenly appear looking deeply uncomfortable in a brand new suit and tie.
In law school (1980) we were instructed that we had to wear a suit and tie for our first-year Oral Advocacy exercise. I was a little annoyed, but I didn’t march to the dean’s office to ask for a determination of whether it would actually prevent me from graduating.
Interestingly, this same school (the University of Texas School of Law) back in the 19th century objected to a demand from Old Main that its graduates wear cap and gown for graduation. So the graduating students were told they had to wear something in common, as a symbol. They marched into a nearby field and picked sunflowers for their lapels. To this day, UT Law School doesn’t have graduation exercises, it has a Sunflower Ceremony.
This is the case at the liberal arts college that I had previously attended, and the large(r) research university that I currently attend. But as mentioned below, there may be restrictions in the dining halls.
Edit: Also as mentioned earlier, there are dress codes in labs.
Indeed. At my college, one student, Nick, from some tiny island off the course of California who had not worn shoes in more than a decade, was forced to put on flip-flops in the dining hall. There was a worry that his feet, which were so tough that he walked (not ran!) to class even in the deepest snow and over the toughest broken bottle strewn sidewalks, might be hurt by a dropped fork. Still, regulations are regulations, and Nick was made to wear shoes in the dining hall, leading to his immortal nickname “Nearly Shoeless Nick.”