What kind of screwball is this?

Law students and baseball caps

http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/1999fall/article1.html

In my experience, many students headed to law school do not intend to practice law. Or so they are very ready to say. Aware of the disrepute attaching to the profession, they are quick to assure you that they just want the degree, in the belief that it opens up other, as yet undetermined, possibilities. They are pre-law non-lawyers. I suspect also that they would be uncomfortable with the declarative force of the older terminology. They would not want to label themselves as future anything. They are not going to be a determinate thing when they grow up. They speak of careers, but not callings. They view law or medicine or journalism as offering interesting opportunities for purely individual satisfaction and advancement. They do not view the law as a profession or a discipline. To be a Future Lawyer of America would suggest that one was part of a larger whole and had a role, both professional and political, to play within that whole. Signing up for the pre-law society does not entail any such expectations.

Yet I suspect students would be happier if they could escape the endless "pre"-ing and prepping and make their way back to a more grounded future. I suspect they would be happier if they could get out of these inchoate societies composed of selves and instead belong to an America with a shape and a content. What the economization and globalization of education means for students is atomization. They are isolated beings, readying themselves to compete with every other person on the planet. No wonder they start interviewing for jobs and lining up employment internships the moment they arrive on campus. By the time we graduate them, their résumés are longer than mine. But they have only the vaguest sense of how a liberal education will assist them in their future, other than providing time and materiel for résumé padding. They spend their college years preparing their applications, rather than preparing themselves by application. Many of them are already PR specialists.

Those less anxiety-ridden look upon college as their last chance at the sandlot. One young man told me that college was really just four years in which to play around until he was old enough to enter the business world. He seemed to expect maturity to arrive automatically when he exchanged his baseball cap for a suit and tie. (Or perhaps he believed that maturity would not be required even then.) Incidentally, if one is looking for symptoms of moral decline, the omnipresent baseball cap is as good as any. I don't know when the cap craze began, but it strikes me as aggressively juvenile, especially when caps are worn in the classroom. The only thing that somewhat reconciles me is that it does seem to be an attempt on the part of young men to claim some article of clothing for themselves as males. While young women will occasionally sport a baseball cap, it remains basically male gear. Since the poor fellows can't figure out what manhood should mean, they settle for the irritating bad boy instead. So entrenched now is the practice that even nice boys don't know that indoor cap wearing is a breach of etiquette. Apparently, neither parents nor teachers bother to inform them, or so I gather from the astonished looks I get when I upbraid them for "dissing" me. Still there is something reassuring in this atavistic male longing to wear a hat. In the past, most male vocations had a hat proper to them, a hat tailored to the task and indicative of the kind and degree of authority the wearer exercised. That whole wondrous array has been leveled. Yet, if democratic equality and boyishness must reign, I suppose it is only fitting that the triumphant headgear be that of the quintessential American game.