THE NOTION OF INSTITUTIONAL PURPOSE. In Inside Higher Ed, Penn's Marybeth Gasman reacts to Morehouse's dress code.

One of the most controversial aspects of the dress code is the banning of women’s clothing and garb. Even though the Morehouse administration consulted the college’s gay students group and the majority of these students voted in favor of the rules, including the ban on women’s garb, this rule may give some pause. I am not an expert on this topic, but I do wonder what will happen if a Morehouse man wants to become a Morehouse woman? What happens to the transgender Morehouse man? Does he go to another college or stay at Morehouse? I don’t have the answer, but I think the Morehouse dress code raises some important questions about race, sexuality, and masculinity that we in higher education should tackle head on and hesitate to avoid. As my friend said, Morehouse College is a standard setter and has the opportunity to be out in front on discussing these
issues.

By raising issues about cross-dressing and dress and appearance generally, Morehouse is forcing discussions and more thought about the way society views black men. And Morehouse is making sure that its black men – who already defy stereotypes with their ambition and intelligence – will do so with their attire as well.

I'm not sure higher education has avoided the issue of social norms: rather, it has yielded the field to the social-constructivist interpretation and taken side with the transgressive and the authentic. (And thus, the unisex toilets and the stories about coeducational showers ...)

The first comment is instructive.

Professor Gasman does a good job in problematizing the initiation of a dress code at Morehouse.

If we contextualize this further to the special traditions and ethos of women's college and evangelical Christian colleges, we find that their traditions are equally questioned and when they make decisions based on the exclusive nature of their institutions, the same reaction that people read from the Morehouse decision repeats itself.

The real dilemma for all three types of institutions is their survival in this Century: women's colleges are down to 54, HBCU's and evangelical institutions hover just over the 100 mark. Plagued by low endowments, poor demographics (only two percent of all evangelical and women's colelge alumni send their children to such colleges), rural environments, the distinctive nature of these institutions look increasing anachronistic. If so, they probably will not survive into the next Century. The issue is: Are they important enough to matter?

Two paragraphs of pomo word noise followed by the possibility that outlier institutions of any kind are failing a market test.

A few comments later somebody gets to the heart of the matter.

The “real world” that I live in ignores people who wear clothing with lewd comments, pajamas in public, or pants hanging around your ankles regardless of the color of their skin. I think that they want a Morehouse man to be a person of influence. Why dilute that influence with dress unbecoming of a professional?

Ayup. Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs, a point the more nihilistic constructivists fail to grasp.