Scold, Scold, Scold

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their midriff-baring and short-skirt fashions and the “tensions” that said fashions are creating. Apropos of not much, in the midst of the article, one student complains that a school media librarian pulled her aside one day last year and chastised her for wearing a too-short skirt. Whether it was appropriate for a librarian to be giving a high school student sartorial tips is neither here nor there. But what does the librarian’s librarianship have to do with the focus of the article? Is it that only a teacher or a principal should have been scolding the student, if someone was to be doing the scolding? Or is it a way of subtly reinforcing the stereotype that librarians are all shushers and scolders and fussbudgets and nags at heart, no matter where they’re employed or what year it is?