Prior to the 2026 opening of the new academic year, Alabama’s Tuskegee University unveiled a campus dress code that brought a storm of online responses from supporters and critics alike.

University President Mark A. Brown’s message to students reads: “Tuskegee students now have a dress code for public and professional places. The Student Handbook requires students to arrive on campus with a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting. Students are prohibited from wearing revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation. They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets, or du-rags to class or the cafeteria.”

“Tuskegee can’t promise students broad freedom of expression while enforcing a sweeping dress code that regulates ordinary, non-disruptive expression,” FIRE Senior Program Counsel Haley Gluhanich told Fox News Digital.

“Preparing students for professional life is a legitimate goal, but it does not hinge on requirements about what adults wear to class or lunch.”

“The focus is how do I make you a professional in whatever space you want to go in?” he said.

“Any higher education institution in the country that’s not focused on student success, no matter what type of university that is, is not focused where they should be. That’s why we exist. That’s exactly why we exist.”

Not all predominantly white colleges lack dress codes.

And like Tuskegee’s Mark Brown, Christendom’s Tim Cook, dean of students and vice-president for student affairs, explained that developing a sense of professionalism in students was one aim of the code.

“Our standards won’t always reflect every current trend and fashion. They’re intended to be somewhat timeless, but in a way that actually prepares our students to go out into the professional world,” he told The Epoch Times.

“There’s plenty of professions—healthcare, law, certain businesses—that require a certain level of dress, and we want our students to be prepared to go into that with a healthy mindset.”

When asked what he thought of Christendom’s dress code, sophomore Nathaniel Young, who is majoring in economics and political science with a minor in music, gave a nod to the professional aspect of dress.

“I’m going to perform better if I’m dressed for the occasion,” Young said.

He continued: “I see an ethical reason for it. I think by dressing appropriately [for] your studies, you’re showing respect [for] yourself. You’re showing that the work that you’re doing deserves a certain amount of formality and also seriousness.

“On top of that, you’re also showing respect to others, those you’re studying with, those you come into contact with, whether that’s other students or professors or staff. So not only is it a level of professional decorum, but also of showing respect to others, showing that they deserve respect just as much as you do.”

Young also finds that more formal attire in the classroom breeds academic success.

“It definitely helps me study more diligently, connect to my studies more, to my classes more,” he said.

“And I think for everybody on campus, it just creates a positive atmosphere. You’re all dressed for an intellectual collegiate pursuit. You’re all pursuing it together.”

Through experimentation, they determined “that clothes can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioral consequences for their wearers.” In sum, what we wear can influence how we think and how we act.

More than a decade ago, after hearing about this concept, I tested it in one of the seminars for homeschoolers that I then taught. With a big test coming up the following week, I asked the students to dress for the exam as they might for church on Sunday or for some formal family event.

After they’d taken the test, and before I’d graded it, I asked how many of them felt that this change in attire had helped them on the exam. About half answered positively; the others felt it had made little difference. Later, I realized that my test was skewed because my students came to class reasonably well-dressed, whatever the occasion.

Nevertheless, for the rest of the semester, three boys wore ties to class on test days.

Combine these advantages with the professional appearance and attitude that college administrators like Brown, Cook, and others are trying to encourage in their students, and some of us might want to take a second look at our own wardrobe.

“If you raise the bar, students will reach it,” Brown said.