Thomas Ziemer

Students: Are you curious about the academic garb faculty and administrators wear for special occasions such as Matriculation Convocation, Honors Convocation and Commencement?

Here is an explanation ahead of today’s Matriculation Convocation:

Academic attire worn during Commencement ceremonies and on other formal occasions is based on common styles of the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe. In a time when both men and women wore gowns or robes, it became common practice to adopt distinctive gowns for various professions, trades and religious orders. The ceremonial garb of a modern academic procession, therefore, is descended from the working clothes of a medieval scholar, who was often at least a lower-order cleric. Long gowns were desirable in unheated medieval universities, and the hood may have been developed to cover the tonsured (shaved typically for religious reasons) head.

This tradition of academic dress, particularly as known at Oxford and Cambridge, passed to the American colonies and was standardized by an Intercollegiate Code in 1895. The code sets forth rules governing the color, shape and materials of the three primary items of academic apparel: the gown, the hood and the cap.

Gowns differ according to the level of degree earned by the wearer. The baccalaureate (bachelor’s degree) gown has pointed sleeves and is worn closed. The gown for the master’s degree has an oblong sleeve, open at the wrist, that hangs down. The rear part of the oblong shape is square-cut, and the front part has an arc cut away. The doctoral gown is the most ornate, with a velvet facing and three velvet chevrons on each bell-shaped sleeve. Both master’s and doctor’s gowns are designed to be worn either open or closed. While most doctoral gowns are black, some universities—e.g., Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford—provide gowns in their institutional colors.

For one who knows how to “read” them, academic hoods signal both the wearer’s field of study (the velvet border) and the institution by which it was conferred (the silk lining). Among the hood linings that might be seen in a Lawrence academic procession are those of Brown University (seal brown, cardinal chevron), City University of New York (lavender), Columbia University (light blue, white chevron), Cornell University (carnelian red, two white chevrons), Harvard University (black hood, crimson-lined), Johns Hopkins University (black, gold chevron), Princeton University (orange, black chevron), Stanford University (cardinal red, no chevron), the University of California (gold, Yale blue chevron), the University of Chicago (maroon, no chevron), the University of Virginia (navy blue, orange chevron), University of Wisconsin–Madison (cardinal, no chevron) and Yale University (Yale blue, no chevron). The Lawrence hood is lined in Yale blue, with two white chevrons.

In addition to the institutional colors, colors associated with specific academic disciplines are used for the trim on doctors’ gowns, the edging of hoods and the tassels of caps. The most frequently worn colors in the Lawrence academic procession are: dark blue (philosophy, including Ph.D.s), pink (music) and lemon (library science). Other discipline-related colors include white (arts, letters, humanities), golden yellow (science), purple (law), copper (economics), drab (business), light blue (education) and brown (fine arts).

The cap was the last item to be added to the academic ensemble and is most often hard and square, although variations in softer materials and in shape have been adopted by some institutions and for women. At Commencement, degree candidates wear the tassel on the right front of the cap and shift it to the left front immediately after degrees are conferred.

The ceremonial mace carried at the head of the academic processions by the college marshal (a senior member of the faculty) and the usher batons carried by faculty deputies were crafted by silversmith E. Dane Purdo, late professor emeritus of art, in 1972.  On the occasion of his retirement in 1991, Professor Purdo presented to the university the presidential badge of office, a sterling and gold pendant worn on ceremonial occasions by President Mark Burstein, which depicts the Lawrence seal suspended by a chair of silver hawthorn leaves representing Milwaukee-Downer College.