Readers may remember this post regarding blue jeans in church. Now we have this article about the dress of another group of people with their own pieties, namely college professors. The question is 
why can't the professorate dress like professionals and adults:
Why the dress problem? Professors might be grown-ups chronologically, but, if you’ve attended faculty meetings, you know we haven’t gotten the behavior patterns right. Joseph Epstein writes:
One of the divisions of the contemporary world is between those who are prepared to dress (roughly) their age and those who see clothes as a means to fight off age.... I know of associate deans who never wear neckties. Others — balding, paunchy, droopy-lidded — have not had a fabric other than denim touch their hindquarters for decades. They, poor dears, believe they are staying young.
Roger Kimball adds, “There is something about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous.”
Trying to look like students is partly self-denial, but scruffily dressed faculty also have highfalutin goals. Some sartorial underachievement is aimed at furthering a “nurturing” atmosphere. The classroom setting should be non-confrontational, it’s argued, with professors and students hangin’ out as buddies.
I recall early in my career showing up at my office on a non-school day. I was simply wearing a button-up shirt and some khakis. A colleague was astounded. "No one's around, you know, you don't have to dress up." Two points. First, when simply wearing a decent shirt and khakis qualifies as "dressing up" you know standards are low. Second, my thought was I was going to work as a professional so I might as well kinda dress like one. Apparently I was wrong.
It is worth your while to read some of the comments in the linked article. The most illuminating are the commentators who fairly spew spittle as they announce that how you dress doesn't matter. The very anger in their writing indicates that apparently it does matter, and quite a bit.
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