Law Students Rally Behind a Woman Shamed for Wearing Shorts to Class

Who says you can’t study law in a comfy pair of shorts? (Photo: Instagram)

It seems that every few weeks we hear about a student being shamed for his or her attire at school. The tradition continues at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, where a professor took it upon himself to humiliate a female student for wearing shorts to class. According to Legally India, professor V Nagaraj allegedly railed into a shorts-clad third-year student, at one point saying, “We all know why parents marry their children off — so that they can have sex. Just because the parents marry off their children for this reason, it does not mean that the children have sex in front of their parents.”

God only knows how one can make the leap from wearing shorts to class to having sex in front of one’s parents (which, by the way, ew), but when you’re making ridiculous statements in the first place, illogical reasoning is to be expected. Nagaraj also called the student’s values into question, allegedly saying, “You can come to class without a dress, also. That is how your character is, I’m going to ignore you.”

Unfortunately for this prudish prof, his students did not take so kindly to his unhinged rant. To show solidarity with the young woman, her classmates protested the incident by showing up to class in shorts. After the professor refused to apologize, the students wrote a “statement of condemnation” over the issue. “We find such behaviour extremely unacceptable, especially coming from a Professor, who students are expected to consider as a role model. NLS has taught us to value discourse above everything else and to be tolerant of individual choices. The behaviour highlighted above goes against the spirit of this institution. Therefore, we believe it is imperative that such aberrant actions be denounced by the University as a whole with immediate effect. We also demand that a public apology be issued by the teacher in question to the concerned student and the institution as a whole.” NLSIU does not have a dress code.

Former head of the NLSIU sexual harassment committee professor VS Elizabeth weighed in on the issue via email. “I must say that it is important that all of us, particularly, faculty should think before we make comments, particularly should not be casting aspersions on people’s character based on what they wear or don’t wear. After all the amount of cloth we use to cover our bodies does not proportionately reflect our morality. Many sexual abusers of children and women most certainly wear more clothes, does it mean that they are more moral than the rest of us?”

We are in a time when notions of proper dress for both men and women are being challenged, as well as the attitudes that go along with them.

At Buchanan High School, in Clovis, Calif., students got together in protest of their rigid dress code, urging the school to consider a more gender-neutral one. The demonstrations, which included male students donning dresses to class, worked so well that the school district later adopted the gender-neutral dress code.

At Tottenville High School, in Staten Island, N.Y., kids came to class in crop tops, shorts, tank tops, and the like to rail against the school’s extremely strict dress code. One of the students argued on Twitter, “I didn’t go to public school to be told how ‘I’m allowed’ to express myself … I can respect myself 150% and still wear shorts and a tank top. Maybe instead of worrying about what I’m wearing, you should worry about the fact that I’m going to graduate high school with next to no life skills whatsoever.”

At the Etobicoke School of the Arts, in Toronto, Canada, a student who was reprimanded for wearing a crop top organized #CropTopDay, in which female students attended school in the trendy silhouette.

Whatever your notions of propriety are or however you feel about any of these cases, it’s clear that we have a lot of reflecting to do in our society on how we speak about the way we dress — and the judgments we pass on other people for what they are wearing.

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