Psst! Morehouse men — pull your pants up!

By Stephane Dunn

I must admit, I had lofty expectations of Morehouse College when I began teaching here two years ago. After all, this was the house that such social and intellectual giants as Benjamin Davis and James Brawley built and that superstar students like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. solidified. The college’s mystique — as the only historically black male college — made me darn near skip into my interview and later into those first few classes.

I had visions of suits, bow ties, yes ma’ams and staggering displays of intellectual brilliance dancing in my head. Before too long, however, reality tempered the mystique, and I was forced to see that a legacy of social and cultural distinction and intellectual achievement is merely a sleeping history unless it continues to thrive in a contemporary version.

The newly implemented “no sagging” dress code with respect to men’s pants is an attempt to do just that.

The code raises obvious questions about individual freedom. Its inclusion of a very traditional script for male style — like no pumps and purses for men — will inevitably elevate the debate and criticism both inside and outside Morehouse. As I’ve walked to and from classes, I’ve often laughed aloud over how much my students resemble the public high school kids that I’d decided might be too much to deal with every day. Rather than being both disciplinarian and etiquette teacher, I thought I’d be a professor primarily engaged in my students’ academic and professional potential.

Instead, there is rarely a day when I’m not reluctantly forced to view the backside of students and worry for the millionth time that I will not make it up the stairway before the loose, bright red shorts shouting out from pants already bound for the floor completely fall off the oblivious student in front of me. It’s like being forced to peep when you absolutely don’t want to.

Usually, after mustering a reluctant, “Excuse me,” I implore the young man to “pull them up please” or jokingly say, “I’m sure you’re not trying to flash anybody.” In class, teaching is punctuated by commands to “pull those pants up, Mr. So-and-So — can’t you feel those pants falling lower and lower?” and trying to wheedle some sleeping or shy student out from his hiding place under a cap. Even if the written rules of the class include no hats in class, I’m inevitably forced to admonish, “Hat, please.”

During these moments of playing dress etiquette police, I’m uneasy and resentful. I’m forced to be their “mama” instead of an accepted and serious sister-professor.

The truth is that an anything goes institutional policy does not work for cultural style. It does not foster the serious mind set toward academic, professional and social development that a private liberal arts college like Morehouse is supposed to be nurturing. It doesn’t even work at home or in many differing public spheres, including the workplace.

Dress is not merely a matter of personal choice, of self-representation; it makes a powerful statement in public and in professional life, suggesting not only who someone might be and where they come from but where they are aspiring to go.

Dress has also been used to help police behavior. There is a reason that nightclub managers often adopt a no jeans, caps, sneakers or do-rags policy for their establishments. They found it helped discourage unruliness in part by discouraging those who might fight rather than dance and mingle. It seems that folk are less likely to be in a fighting mind-set when they’re dressed up.

And yet, deciding the boundaries that should govern what’s worn on the body and personal style in a shared community like a college is not a simple matter of merely listing some don’ts and then writing them into the official laws of the institution. Extremes are as faulty as a policy of anything goes.

Secretly, I have longed for a shift from this sagging pants style that’s become, ironically, perfect conformity, and toward a dress code that’s a nonunderwear-showing hodge-podge of gentlemen’s style across time.

I know this is tricky. What constitutes gentlemanly style, particularly in an era of sexual and gender deconstruction? At the risk of being forever assigned to the out-of-touch generation, I think it’s time to retire that overdone sag.

The new code at Morehouse should be a starting point for provoking serious dialogue about the politics of dress and style in a learning environment. This might mean that the code needs some readjusting as students and the administration and faculty weigh in together.

I say this with brave hope, despite a little nightmare I started having while pregnant with my potentially Morehouse-bound son. We arrive on campus, excited and expectant, only to find ourselves submerged in a sea of ties and sagging pants.

Stephane Dunn, an assistant professor in the English Department at Morehouse College, is the author of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.”