Tuskegee University President Mark Brown says the dress code banning durags and bonnets is about workplace readiness, not respectability politics.
Page B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
FBI eases hiring rules on theft, prostitution as college defends stricter dress code
DIED: Consistency — the notion that the bar moves in one direction, whichever institution you happen to work for. Born sometime after J. Edgar Hoover decided a special agent should not be caught in a compromising position, the standard survived nine decades of hearings, two reorganizations, and every director in between insisting that character mattered as much as marksmanship. It is survived by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which this week revised its hiring rules to no longer automatically disqualify applicants with a history that includes prostitution or stealing from an employer. The bureau's word for it was 'revises.' The plain word is looser. It is preceded in death, oddly, at a historically Black university two states over, where the president held the opposite line entirely — told students complaining about the dress code to raise the bar themselves, because they would reach it. Nobody accused either institution of being wrong on its own terms. A bureau short on applicants might reasonably decide a decade-old employment dispute shouldn't disqualify a capable investigator. A college president trying to build discipline in eighteen-year-olds isn't inventing the idea that presentation matters. What died is the assumption that the bar means the same thing depending on who's being asked to clear it. That's some kind of bunk, dressed up as personnel policy, and this obituarist has read enough personnel policy in his time to recognize the dressing. No cause of death was listed on the bureau's announcement, which is standard practice; institutions rarely list the cause when they are the cause. Call it malarkey, mostly, and a hiring shortage nobody wanted to say out loud in plain English. The deceased leaves behind an uncomfortable arithmetic that isn't going anywhere: the agency that carries a badge and a gun gets more room to have made mistakes on the way up; the twenty-year-old in a collared shirt gets less. That's a strange shit to build a personnel policy around, though nobody at either institution would put it that plainly, and it fell to this desk to say it instead. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any institution setting a standard for who gets trusted with power be prepared to explain, in writing, why the bar sits precisely where it does — and for whom it moves when nobody's watching.
“The FBI just made it easier to get hired with a theft charge on the résumé while a college president three states over is telling nineteen-year-olds to tuck in their shirts or else. Guess which bar bends for the people who get to carry a badge and a gun.”
“Widening the applicant pool means not disqualifying people over old, isolated incidents that don't reflect current judgment — that's just modern hiring practice, nothing radical. It's not lowering the bar, it's recalibrating the bar. Though I'll grant that 'theft from an employer' is an unusual thing to recalibrate toward.”
The receipts
The FBI has revised its hiring standards and no longer disqualifies applicants who admitted to hiring prostitutes or stealing from an employer. The new guidelines come following the retirement, resignation and termination of scores of FBI…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.