Tennessee State University has established a new tradition for the start of the school year. Freshman guys receive TSU neckties. In the process, many learn how to tie them.
“You always want to make sure it’s just above your navel,” state Rep. Harold Love, Jr., tells freshman Jamir Jackson.
The 1994 TSU graduate is helping out with an initiative in its third year known as ”
Tied to Success,” showing Jackson some new tricks, including a special wide knot that he came up with himself.
“It’s about hand movement. That’s all it is,” Love says.
The program gives students a skill they’ll need in professional life. But it also allows them to meet potential role models.
“Why tie a tie? Well, you may want to be a state representative one day.” Love says he, like many professionals, wears a tie every day. “You may want to be a doctor one day, so you get a doctor in to teach them how to tie a tie. You want to be an administrator some day, so you learn how to tie a tie and you wear that tie, but you also can engage in a conversation and say, ‘How do I get to where you are from where I am?'”
The initiative has symbolic value. Program coordinators at the school’s
Man Center see the event as part of their broader mission—supporting male students, whose graduation and retention rates lag behind those of their female peers.
Derrick Rowell is a freshman from Washington, D.C. He had never tied a tie until his high school graduation last spring, and before that, he’d always used clip-ons. Never again.
“This is going to be the number one tie now—showing off what college you go to,” Rowell says after receiving his tie at the first of the school year. “When I go home, I’m definitely going to wear the tie.”
University officials hope students will wear their TSU ties with pride, whether they’re on campus or at job interviews.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM