Tuskegee University Dress Code Sparks Debate

Tuskegee University recently ignited an online firestorm after the historically Black university in Alabama announced new dress code guidelines for students, banning bonnets, du-rags and slippers in classrooms and the cafeteria.

Tuskegee leaders, and other advocates of the policy, say the new dress code prepares students for the professional world post-college. Critics argue the standards are overly restrictive and target clothing associated with Black hairstyles and culture. Some Black scholars say the news is going viral because it hit a raw nerve—an ongoing conversation about respectability politics within Black communities, particularly at HBCUs, and a growing generational divide on the topic.

The clash over clothing at Tuskegee reflects an “eons-old” debate “around Black people’s personal comportment, behavior—this idea that how one carried themselves … the class expressions they had, were going to convey to a white dominant mainstream that we deserved citizenship” and other rights, said Saida Grundy, associate professor of sociology, African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University and an alum of Spelman College.

As a part of Tuskegee’s new policy, students are also expected to show up on campus with “a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting” and avoid “revealing clothing” in classes, the dining hall and official university settings such as Convocation, according to a message from the university’s president, Mark Brown. (The university has a community closet where students have access to donated business attire.) Professors have the right to enforce the dress code, as well as a new ban on cell phone use in class, the message notes.

“The goal here is not meant to restrict you from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare you with a solid foundation for the workforce you will enter once you leave Tuskegee,” Brown wrote. “Employers are less forgiving and too often presentation may overrule stellar preparation.”

A Fierce Debate

The dress code spawned a flurry of think pieces, TikTok and Instagram reaction videos and social media threads hundreds of comments long, hotly debating the move, with HBCU alumni, students and others taking a wide range of stances.

Some argued that Black students are being held to different standards than their peers at predominantly white institutions, who often show up to class in casual wear.

“While I believe that students should have high expectations for themselves that inform how they show up in the world,” Norfolk State University student Le’Ren Jones told WAVY-TV, “I fear that policies like this will disempower Black students and threaten the sense of belonging that draws many of them to HBCUs rather than PWIs, where ball caps and slippers can be seen in classrooms and dining halls on a regular basis.”

Rayne Caldwell, sophomore class president at Tuskegee University, said in a video message that Tuskegee students have always understood what they can and can’t wear in professional settings. She emphasized that she’d rather see the university focus on issues that matter to students, such as professional development opportunities or their transportation and housing needs, than on what they’re wearing.

“The concern isn’t that Tuskegee wants us to look professional,” she said. “The concern is that appearance seems to be receiving more immediate attention than the issues affecting students’ ability to succeed.”

Caldwell also anonymously quoted an Instagram post from another student who opposed the decision: “At a time where our people are already over-regulated in a country that has oppressed us for centuries, you would think that a historically black university would serve as a safe space for us,” the student posted. “Instead in the name of ‘preparing for the workforce,’ the university is policing our cultural hair coverings in completely casual settings. We all know how to conduct ourselves as black people in white spaces. We don’t need the university to emulate such a space.”

Others weighed in defending the policy.

Ron Stewart, a Tuskegee alumni and sociology professor at Buffalo State University, told Inside Higher Ed that Tuskegee’s dress code is “long overdue.”

“This is preparation for life after college,” Stewart said. “Maybe I’m old school,” but “I think the presentation of self is important. We should be developing students comprehensively.”

He believes the same standards should apply across higher ed—so much so that he gives his students at Buffalo State, a non-HBCU, extra credit points if they dress up for exams.

Casual wear makes it seem “like they just don’t care, and I think when you have that attitude about how you present, that attitude can permeate other things, other dispositions you might have about how you conduct yourself in society,” he said. As far as he’s concerned, Tuskegee’s dress code is “a good policy overall, and I hope it catches on.”

Clothes in Context

Tuskegee isn’t the first institution to introduce such a policy. Among HBCUs, dress codes are fairly common.

Hampton University’s dress code, for example, prohibits du-rags, bonnets, skull caps, scarves and bandanas “at all times” outside of student housing. Dillard University’s student handbook asks students to “dress neatly” and outlines “appropriate dress for various occasions,” including classrooms, the cafeteria and university offices. Men must take off caps and hats worn for nonreligious purposes before entering the dining hall at Claflin University. And Virginia Union University has an extensive dress code that bans not just du-rags and bonnets but “pants worn in a ‘baggy’ fashion,” hoodies with the hood up, head scarves and curlers.

Stewart wrote in a Facebook post that, for many years, HBCU alumni traditionally dressed up on campus, making “dresses and suits or proximate … par for the course.”

While he’s not suggesting a return to that level of formality, “the way today’s students are attired is a form of blatant disrespect towards the sartorial traditions of our collegiate ancestors,” he wrote. “Doo rags, bonnets, pajamas, slippers, etc. let me know these aren’t the kinds of students who will be avatars of Black excellence and liberation … If you’re serious about Black excellence and liberation you’ll look the part.”

The battle lines in the debate over HBCU dress codes reflect class and generational divides over respectability politics said Grundy, who published a book on the subject in 2022.

“You see an older generation of Black people who have a much more conservative idea of Black uplift,” she said.

Circa Images/GHI/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Against that backdrop, she isn’t surprised that Tuskegee and some other HBCUs ban head coverings used to protect Black hair styles, like bonnets and du-rags, which can also be an “expression of hip-hop culture associated with working class urban Black people.” She believes such dress codes reflect “a class anxiety” at HBCUs, even though they disproportionately enroll first-generation students.

“There’s an idea somehow that Black students need to constantly live as though white elites are looking at them,” she said. But younger generations are pushing back on that idea, marking a “generational shift.”

These debates within Black communities tend to play out at HBCUs because the institutions are “so important to the hearts and minds of what it means to be Black,” she noted. “Not only do they preserve Black cultural traditions, they produce Black knowledge … the leadership for Black communities. They really are these small oases, these incubators” where people wrestle with “what does it mean to be Black?”

For her part, she’d rather do without the dress codes.

As a professor, “we just want them to come to class,” Grundy said. “I don’t want a single ounce of increased friction between them waking up in their bed and ending up in the seat. To me, professionalism is: Did you read the syllabus? Have you done the reading for today? Have you started ahead on your assignment? Did you turn in the assignment on time?” Professionalism is “how they take accountability for their preparedness intellectually.”

For Imani Cheers, associate professor of digital storytelling at George Washington University, who earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at Howard University, Tuskegee’s dress code isn’t about “assimilation” or “attainment of whiteness”; it’s about preserving a part of the history and culture of HBCUs.

“The legacies on these campuses were about presenting oneself in community, of course [but also] in your fresh and finest attire,” she said. “That’s just how you showed up in these academic spaces,” because the goal was “to be your best self within these historically Black spaces.”