Dressing up in residential schools

As  I was getting ready this morning to go deliver my lecture at IIMB, the wife expressed surprise at how casually I was dressed (I wore jeans, a (collared, “formal”) t-shirt and a hoodie). “In my business school all professors wear suits”, she said. My mind went back to the time when I was a student at IIMB, trying to remember what professors wore. While they were generally dressed more formally than I was today, no one wore suits – the only one who wore a blazer every day was easily the worst professor who taught me at IIMB!

I was thinking about why I don’t feel like dressing formally while going to IIM. And then I thought of the students, and realised that with the odd exception, I’m easily much more formally dressed than most of my students. When students turn up to class in track pants, professors have no incentive to wear anything close to a suit!

And this is not a new phenomenon. Back in my time too, close to ten years ago, people would wear track pants and other articles of clothing you might describe as “home wear” to class (Not me, though. I don’t wear track pants. As a rule. But I remember making it a point to wear shorts to all my final term examinations). So I started thinking about what it is about IIMB that makes people wear “home wear” to class. And I realised it has to do with the proximity.

IIM Bangalore is a wholly residential campus, and the student accommodation is a short walk away from most of the classrooms. In the second year, thanks to electives time tables are such that there is a good chance of having long breaks between classes, so you go to the academic part of the institute for only one class.

When you are going to a classroom that is only a short walk away from where you live, and when you go there only for one or two classes, it doesn’t feel like you’re “going somewhere”, so you don’t see any point in dressing up. Moreover, most of the people you meet in class are people you share a hostel with – these people would have seen you in your pyjamas anyway, and seen you get sloshed all over L^2 during one of those parties which I’m told are not so common nowadays! So there is no good reason for you to dress up! And you come to the class in pyjamas!

The wife’s B-school is not residential, and people live a few kilometres away. Very few pairs of people would have seen each other in their pyjamas, and the distance means people are “going somewhere” when going to a school. And so people dress up (and by that I mean they really dress up!). And when students are well-dressed, the professor wants to show off his superior social standing, and thus wears as formal clothes as he can – which usually means a suit!

Again I’m talking from small number of data points – I’ve lived in another residential institution (IIT Madras) – and that too was famous for its rather muted/horrible dressing sense. It’s a pity/mercy (depending on the way you look at it) that us IIMB people manage to well cover up our generally bad dressing by wearing suits at interviews and PPTs and other public events!