The Tuskegee Dress Code and Institutional Power (opinion)

A recent social media exchange with journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones about Tuskegee University’s decision to prohibit bonnets, du-rags and other head coverings in classrooms and the cafeteria reminded me how quickly conversations about institutional authority become conversations about individual behavior. The larger question is not about bonnets. It is about institutional power (or put more rightly, <power>).

Tuskegee’s policy has reignited a debate, familiar to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, over professionalism, respectability politics and Black identity. Those conversations matter. But as an HBCU graduate who later attended, worked at and conducted research within predominantly white institutions, I found myself reading the controversy differently. My training in organizational communication and higher education taught me that institutions communicate through more than mission statements. They communicate through policy. The rules institutions choose to enforce reveal what they value. There is a difference between setting a standard and making a rule. That distinction has been largely absent from this debate.

Read in its entirety, the Tuskegee policy does more than address dress. Alongside restrictions on bonnets and du-rags are expectations about attendance, classroom behavior, cell phone use and workforce preparation. Taken together, these provisions construct a particular vision of the “good student.” Policies teach professionalism not simply by describing it but by codifying it.

During my undergraduate years at Fayetteville State University, another HBCU, our campus regularly hosted “Dress for Success Wednesdays.” Student leaders, athletes and organizations dressed professionally for presentations, interviews and special events. Those moments encouraged students to imagine themselves as professionals while allowing Black culture and expression to flourish. We learned expectations through mentorship and modeling, not prohibition.

In a message about the dress code, Tuskegee President Mark A. Brown invokes standards around professionalism, writing, “Employers are less forgiving and too often presentation may overrule stellar preparation.” But if presentation routinely overrules preparation, should higher education reproduce that reality, or should it challenge it? Institutions do not simply prepare students for the workforce; they also define what counts as work-ready.

Higher education does not simply educate students. It socializes them into ideas about <legitimacy>, <professionalism>, and <belonging>. Colleges and universities are among the most consequential sites of institutional socialization because they prepare students not only for careers, but for citizenship, leadership and participation in organizational life. It is here that students learn that power rarely announces itself loudly. More often, it arrives quietly through syllabi, student handbooks, dress codes, residence hall policies, and the many rules that tell us what it means to belong. By the time students graduate, they have learned far more than chemistry, literature or engineering. They have learned which parts of themselves are affirmed, which are tolerated, and which are expected to change.

A faculty member encouraging students to dress professionally for an internship reflects an educational expectation. A university policy prohibiting specific forms of cultural expression invokes institutional authority. Those are fundamentally different acts because institutions possess a kind of power individuals do not. Policies communicate not simply what an institution prefers, but what it is willing to discipline.

Organizational communication scholars have long argued that policies socialize members, establish norms and shape institutional identity. Higher education scholars likewise remind us that organizational culture is never culturally neutral. This is where Diane Gusa’s concept of White Institutional Presence remains instructive. Gusa argued that institutional norms often appear race-neutral while reflecting dominant assumptions about professionalism, legitimacy and belonging. The theory is not about the racial composition of a campus. It is about the organizational norms institutions reproduce. Those dynamics do not automatically disappear because an institution is historically Black.

Black Americans understand, perhaps better than anyone, that regulation rarely begins with ideas. It begins with bodies. Institutional regulation of Black appearance therefore carries a history far beyond clothing. History has repeatedly shown that institutions first decide who belongs by regulating how people move, gather, dress, speak and occupy space. Black Codes after Reconstruction, school dress codes, workplace grooming policies, and even military regulations each communicated a similar lesson: legitimacy often required conformity to standards someone else had already defined.

None of this suggests that HBCUs should abandon standards around professionalism. Quite the opposite. For more than a century, HBCUs have demonstrated that excellence does not require cultural assimilation. For generations, they have cultivated Black physicians, engineers, lawyers, educators, scientists, artists, and scholars while simultaneously affirming Black identity. HBCUs have never needed institutional prohibitions to produce excellence.

Had a predominantly white institution adopted a similar policy, many scholars would immediately analyze it through the lens of organizational culture, identity and institutional power. We should be equally willing to ask those questions when the institution is historically Black. Doing so is not a critique of HBCUs. It is an affirmation that every institution should critically examine the values embedded within the policies it enforces.

Ultimately, students are not simply negotiating academic expectations. They are negotiating identity within institutions that communicate, through policy, which expressions of self are recognized as professional.

Standards have the <power> to educate. Rules have the <power> to regulate. Institutions should know the difference.