Somewhere up in Academic Heaven, my old friend Amitai Etzioni is smiling. Back when I was the executive director of the National Chamber Foundation, I gave a grant to the Professor of Sociology at George Washington University to prepare a report that he titled, “Self-Discipline, Schools, and the Business Community.”

Education Week wrote in part,

In “Self-Discipline, Schools, and the Business Community,” Etzioni, author of “An Immodest Agenda: Rebuilding America Before the 21st Century”expressed the belief that “large parts of the present generation of Americans are psychically underdeveloped … [and] have insufficient ability to control impulse, mobilize ego, and to be able to sustain the work ethic…In their preoccupation with the cognitive,” Mr. Etzioni writes, “most parents and educators have ignored the importance to schooling of psychic development. It ought to be the first criterion we use in assessing schools: their contribution to the development of character or personality, to the formation of habits of thought and behavior that enable the student not only to acquire cognitive skills but also to act constructively in any situation.”

The professor emphasized the importance of such life skills as self-discipline, proper decorum, dress, civility, meeting deadlines, punctuality and other “non-academic skills.” Etzioni might have written Dr. Brown’s memo. Believe it or not, my foundation’s report was considered controversial, and this was 40 years ago. Amatai was in turn amused and shocked. Both of us considered his assertions, which he backed by studies and data, common sense and obvious, but still worth publicizing.

Similarly, the new Tuskegee dress code has been criticized as too “white” and “conservative,” with some critics in the black community attacking the rules as a restriction on “free expression” and a capitulation to “respectability politics.” This has led to the usual uproar on social media and various podcasts, like….

Dr. Brown is not dissuaded. “I had a wonderful time riding around and walking around the campus on the first and the second day of class,” he said this week. “The bar was raised and it was being reached. “But the same is true as if you lower the bar, or if you go past the mistake and fail to address it: That becomes the standard. And so, you know, we are a university of standards. I believe all of higher education should be a university standards.”

He continued, “Any higher education institution in the country that’s not focused on student success, no matter what type of university that is, is not focused where they should be. That’s why we exist. That’s exactly why we exist…It’s not the world we wish you were going into, it’s the world you’re going to go into. It’s not the way that we wish an employer would perceive you. It’s the way the employer will perceive you.”

I love the objections from the students who are arguing that because they pay so much for tuition, they should be able to wear whatever they want to on campus. Morons.

Brown noted that the debate over whether college is worth the cost mandates that universities prepare students for what comes after graduation. “What do you want when you send your son or daughter to college?” Brown said. “What do you expect us to do and what do you expect to happen four or five years from now when they graduate? We want them job-ready.”

Then he also evoked one of Prof. Etzioni’s main themes in the NCF study—punctuality. “Wouldn’t it be sad for us to allow a student to come to class late, practice that for four to five years, and then [for students to] find out that no matter how great they were with their 4.0 or 3.8 GPA, it won’t keep them that job?”

I was passionate about that study; I raised the money to fund it. Who knows? Maybe in some small way it launched something into the cosmos that helped guide the Tuskegee University president to what seems, incredibly enough, as this bold move in the black community.