OAU’s dress code controversy…

HAD it not been that I had scribbled this before reading my brother and professional colleague, Segun Adeniyi’s “On ‘S3xually Provocative Dresses”, I would have said what he wrote captured my own views and sufficiently addressed the vexatious matter; but since it has already been written, let it also be said that I, too, added my own voice and stand to be counted among those critically opposed to OAU’s controversial dress code. Before reading Adeniyi, I had written: “My alma mater, the iconic University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, is in the news for the wrong reasons! The authorities of the institution are said to have rolled out a Stone Age dress code for its students! Any dress code for the lecturers and other staff, if I may ask? Don’t tell me it is only in France that a female teacher could seduce a student two decades her junior in age and, today, they both live together as husband and wife! It is unfortunate—and sad—if dress code is what the authorities of an institution of higher learning would occupy itself with in this Artificial Intelligence age! For one, the penalties for infraction are too steep. They were fashioned to ruin, not reform and make the students into better individuals. For another, there are more serious issues to contend with: Decrepit infrastructure, no water, no electricity, run-down as well as inadequate hostel accommodation and lecture theatres; archaic libraries and empty laboratories – name it! Great Ife keeps slipping down the pecking order of the country’s elite universities, beaten by the likes of LASU, UNILORIN, Covenant University—just imagine! Is it a dress code that will take OAU back to the height it once occupied as “the greatest of the greatest”?

Granted that the university has recently had issues with Romeo lecturers and a few have been exposed, tried and sent packing; are we not now, with this dress code, trying to push the blame for the lecturers’ misdemeanor on students’ improper dressing? Yes, students should dress properly; the university is the citadel of learning and not a brothel or theatre for fashion parades. Great Ife is not only for learning, it is also for culture. Proper dressing, not nudity, is an essential part of our culture. But let the OAU authorities find a better way of inculcating these values into the students rather than ruining their academic career under the guise of enforcing a dress code that will make all of us the butt of cruel jokes in the comity of the enlightened.” Period!  

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