I'm about to describe one of those series of connections in the brain that leads from Point A to Point 11, but somehow makes sense. I was listening to an embarrassing interview of two college job-seekers on National Public Radio this morning. It was embarrassing because they attend my undergraduate alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, yet they both communicate like dolts. Every word sounded as if it were being dragged from their mouths and through a grease trap before depositing itself in your ear. Their sentences were littered with the obligatory "likes" and "uhs" that seem to pollute the speech of every American between the ages of 10 and 30. ("He was like, 'uh, you stole my bagel,' and I was, uh, like, 'whatever'.") I couldn't see them, but I am certain they were wearing droopy jeans, untucked shirts, and whatever backwards baseball cap the other two hundred individualists in their fraternity happen to be sporting this semester.

This made me think of a wonderful movie I saw a few weeks ago, A Beautiful Mind, about the gifted and schizophrenic Nobel-laureate mathematician John Nash. I thought of this movie because I remember being enamored with its portrayal of 1940's and 1950's college campuses. Men wore slacks, shirts, and ties, women wore dresses and sweaters, and everyone looked more or less like he gave a darn about his appearance. It actually made a college teaching career momentarily appealing again.

This in turn made me think of a recent trip I made to a large public university. I drove through the heart of campus during a class change, and visited two buildings. I am not exaggerating when I report that I saw not one single student dressed in khakis, slacks, or a dress. All of the boys (that's right, when you dress more poorly than my two year-old son, you're a boy) had on some variation of what I envisioned the Carolina interviewees wearing, while the girls alternated between emulating the boys and dressing like the sort of slut who surely didn't have a long life before the advent of penicillin. Every slovenly soul was slouching and scraping his feet, and I saw not a glimmer of intelligence in the whole lot of them.

I'm sure most of them will grow up, and the ones who get jobs in the private sector will eventually learn how to dress and speak like some shadow of a better time. It's distressing nonetheless, to think of what social and family institutions must have eroded to produce such a pitiful display, which I assure you is replicated at every major U.S. public university, and many private colleges as well.

Adults are little better, of course. We are all treated to the spectacle every summer of seeing overweight white guys traipse through the grocery store in baggy shorts and an L.A. Lakers tank top that says "Bryant" on the back, for example, or mothers who apparently raid the closets of their twelve year-old daughters. What's especially humorous is to visit a place where employees are still required to at least feign commitment to some sort of dress code, but where enforcement is at a minimum. One of the employees at my local Post Office, for example, wears an untucked, overly small, unmatching dress shirt over her regulation slacks, with a piece of elastic from her underwear splayed across the the inevitably exposed white flesh of her gut. This woman just doesn't care anymore. And why should she? Nobody else seems to care either.

Except me, Tony Woodlief. And I aim to stand athwart fashion history and demand that it yield.