For The Record, I Am Currently Wearing A Skirt

The first thing I want to say is that I love Ave Maria University. My four years at the school were some of the most formative, eye-opening, and enjoyable years of my life. I studied with phenomenal professors, got a terrific education, and made wonderful friends along the way. Anyone who reads this post as a denunciation of the school as a whole isn’t paying close enough attention.

With that said: Yikes. They did it again.

Yesterday, an article on the Naples Daily News website revealed that, beginning in the autumn, female employees of the university, including faculty members, will be required to wear skirts or dresses to work. The official wording of the statement as included in the NDN article reads as follows:

In addition, beginning August 30, 2010 the AMU Dress Code Policy will be revised to state that female employees will no longer be permitted to wear slacks or pant suits during work hours. They will however be permitted to wear slacks when traveling.

Just to make sure that’s clear in your mind: The school has enacted a policy wherein it requires its female employees—staff members and professors—to wear skirts to work.

Now, to be fair, the new policy also tightens up requirements for male employees. It mandates suits for male staffers and a minimum of jacket and tie “with a preference of suits” for male members of the faculty. (Incidentally, note the differential: male professors are subjected to a less restrictive policy than male staffers. Female professors receive no similar nod of deference.)

But let’s get back to the skirts. The university has proffered the following snippets—the first in the official statement of policy, the second in a response issued as the result of the initial hullabaloo—in defense of its somewhat bewildering decision:

Please keep in mind that we are implementing this change to improve our overall appearance as an institution of professionals.

We realize it is contrary to the very casual dress policies that are being adopted by many other universities and corporate America. However, we are striving to portray our excellent faculty and staff in a highly professional public manner. We believe this new policy will help visually set us apart in a positive way from other institutions of higher learning.

In other words, as far as the record shows, the university’s motivation for the new policy is 100% a question of professionalism. On its face, this is a difficult position to quibble with. Professionalism is important.

But consider this. On the Capitol floor in DC—which, whatever one’s opinion might be about the actual professionalism of its occupants, is inarguably one of the most demanding fora in the country from the perspective of formality in dress—women are required to wear either a skirt or dress, or a jacket. Which means they can wear pants, as long as they wear a jacket as well. Skirt with cardigan? Fine. Business dress? Fine. Pantsuit? Also fine. Pants! Are fine! On the floor of the United States legislature!

My point is this: It is absurd for the university to attempt a defense of the no-pants policy from a professionalism standpoint. Anyone who wants to have an argument about whether skirt suits are intrinsically more professional than pant suits for women can feel free to do so, but the answer is irrelevant to this question because the Ave Maria policy doesn’t mandate skirt suits. It mandates skirts. And the simple fact of the matter is this: by contemporary standards, a woman wearing dress slacks and a suit jacket is dressed every bit as professionally as a woman wearing ballet flats, a skirt, and a sweater.

The problem, of course, is that nothing at Ave Maria (or any organization, really) is ever as simple as the press releases say it is. In this particular case, and with no malicious intent, I am willing to bet my reputation that the skirts-only policy stems, at least in part, from a perception on the part of Chancellor Monaghan and/or other high-level university authorities that skirts just “look better” on women, or are “more feminine” or “more appropriate” than pants. I couldn’t tell you what proportion of the motivation for the policy change comes from this idea, nor would I even say with confidence that the idea has ever been articulated in so many words. But it’s in there somewhere. You can take that to the bank.

It’s hard to know where to take the argument from that point, but let’s start with this. If we take the university’s position at face value, then at the very least this is yet another documented instance in which administrators’ failure to think things through sufficiently has garnered Ave Maria negative media attention, and gosh, I wish they’d stop. I’m not suggesting that any organization should allow itself to be pushed around by the spectre of media criticism, but every organization—and especially one like Ave Maria, which invites negative press just by virtue of its existence—has to deal with the reality of media relations and ought to plan accordingly. And from a public relations perspective, there is no justification for the gender differential. If the school is shooting straight and the motivation behind the policy change is one hundred percent a question of formality, why not simply require all employees—of both sexes—to wear suits every day? A suits-only policy would arguable create a more professional atmosphere than one allowing skirts with blouses or sweaters.

If, on the other hand, I’m correct in believing that the policy change is motivated at least in part by key administrators’ belief that skirts are always better than pants, then we have bigger problems than lack of foresight. At this point, I’m not interested in discussing the relative womanliness of skirts and pants, or the question of whether or not it’s acceptable for an employer to impose femininity on in its female employees (although, for the record: it’s not). I’m interested in Ave Maria. And I think that the no-pants policy, whichever way you spin it, is bad for the school.

When I was deciding where to go to college, I had two primary criteria. I wanted to spend four years at an authentically Catholic school, and I wanted to emerge on the other end more fully equipped to live as a Catholic in the world than I had been when I started. I chose Ave Maria over places like Christendom College precisely because I thought it would better enable me to engage and transform the world it was preparing me to enter. And I was right. In the chapel at Ave Maria, I was challenged to live a life that bears the light of holiness to a world in darkness. In the classroom, my professors asserted the existence of the Truth—and they taught me how to seek it with my intellect, to fight for it on its own terms. In the English Pub, I learned how to defend the teaching of the Church and drink beer at the same time. It was Catholic, and it was real life. That’s Ave Maria.

And that’s the real problem here. Not skirts-versus-pants as such, but real life. Openness. Ave Maria is valuable because it teaches the truth while enabling its students to engage the world. Students, staff, and faculty members entrust their futures to the school because they believe that engaging the world is an important thing to do. And to the degree that the university enacts policies that invite descriptors like “backward” and “sexist,” it hinders itself in the accomplishment of that purpose. Ave Maria University has set itself a task of considerable size and no little importance, and I believe it can succeed. But its leaders need to learn a lesson that any woman should be able to teach them: if you have a long race to run, wear track shoes and gym shorts, not stilettos and a pencil skirt.