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Chavs Need Not Apply

9:59 AM, Apr 15, 2008 • By JAIME SNEIDER
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Some British universities are reestablishing dress codes, forcing students to leave their unsightly Burberry caps and trainers at home.

Students are being made to sign contracts which may force them to throw away their scruffy jumpers and torn jeans.

A growing number of universities are presenting prospective undergraduates with "charters" dictating aspects of their behaviour--including dress.

But Baroness Ruth Deech, the independent adjudicator for higher education, says many such documents are "too legalistic".

Some teenagers do not know what they are agreeing to when they sign the contracts.

Are college bound kids really incapable of parsing dress-code policies? Instead of signing their names, do they just make a series of Xs? And what does the "independent adjudicator for higher education" do anyway?

Leaving these questions aside, this is surely a welcome development. Anyone who has set foot on a college campus in the last few years (decades?) knows the typical youth has a wardrobe consisting entirely of pajama-bottoms, t-shirts, and flip-flops. At Brown University, if my sources are to be trusted, students rarely wear anything at all.

It hasn't always been this way--not even in the late 1960s. Although the architects of the counter-culture would certainly prefer to erase all memory of their better-dressed peers, take a look at these photos of the 1968 riots at Columbia University. You'll note there were a bunch of students even wearing ties.

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