By: Maura Less & Jake Spear

BLOOMINTON— On January 27th, 2019, the Kelley School of Business announced that Apple AirPods are now a requirement for the Kelley Business Professional dress code. This is meant to reinforce Kelley’s reputation as a wealthy school and provide their students an overall more professional, high-income look.

After Carmel High School announced this new standard, Dean Idalene F. Kesner decided that Kelley should follow this trend of requiring all students to wear AirPods. When asked about her decision, Kesner said she was heavily influenced by the memes her fellow professionals were sharing. “At first, I thought these memes were pedestrian, created by SPEA professors,” she explained. “But after I saw them showing up in my LinkedIn feed, I started to feel insecure if I wasn’t wearing ‘Pods’ while scrolling through my timeline. AirPods have clearly become a status symbol and without them, our school is beginning to look like we’re broke. We’re not broke, and this will prove it.”

Students at the Kelley School were mostly pleased with this addition. Kelley junior Kyle Reece expressed his excitement about this change. “I think it’s pretty tight that I can listen to Uzi while I present now, ’cause standing up there with the team during case competitions can get really boring.”

However, not all students are as enthusiastic. Aman Saifi, a freshman living in the KLLC, claims this change is “classist” and “an undue burden on students of lower socio-economic status.” Saifi has spearheaded a group to standardize Kelley’s dress code in a way that is both professional and affordable, named the Professional Organization in Opposition to the Rich (P.O.O.R.).

So far, P.O.O.R. has been unsuccessful. During a meeting with the Dean requesting accommodation for other forms of Bluetooth headphones, Kesner refused to take out her Airpods, responding “I can’t hear you; I don’t speak broke.”