College Dress Codes

College is often thought of as a place where young adults are able to spread their wings and explore who they are, while still preparing for the life they have ahead of them, but at UC Berkeley in 1964 students did not exactly have that luxury. The university’s president, Clark Kerr, banned any political action or protest not directly related to the university from occurring on campus (Ness). He did so after members of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) group were caught giving out flyers to support their cause on campus (“1960s”). Among these CORE members was Mario Savio, who later became the face of a radical protest for student freedom at Berkeley (Gonzales). Savio was arrested along with seven other students for handing out these flyers. Because these students were fighting for political issues when America was just coming out of a cold war with the Soviet Union, any sort of political action outside of the norm was labeled as communism and made Americans not apart of the political cause nervous (“Free”). Outraged, students, alumni,

At Penn State women usually had to wear a dress or skirt and men, a tie and jacket to evening meals in the dining hall. Students had to dress as if they were going out to eat at a five star restaurant just to eat the grossly unremarkable food in the dining hall, every single night (“Authority”). This was an unfair to students because the campus was their home and simply wished to be comfortable at the dining area in their “home”. The dress code was quickly abolished and is now not even in the vocabulary at most major universities. Without the Free Speech Movement there is a small chance that any student, at any university would have had the audacity to challenge dress codes. In fact, at Berkeley in the 1990’s, Luis Andrew “The Naked Guy” Martinez, fought to justify wear nothing at all