Friday,
June 13, 2008, 10 A.M.
Beckman Mall
These
tribal rites have a very long history. They go back to the ceremony
of initiation for new university teachers in mediaeval Europe.
It was then customary for students, after an appropriate apprenticeship
to learning and the presentation of a thesis as their masterpiece,
to be admitted to the Guild of Masters of Arts and granted the
license to teach. In the ancient University of Bologna this right
was granted by authority of the Pope and in the name of the Holy
Trinity. We do not this day claim such high authority.
As
in any other guild, whether craft or merchant, the master's status
was crucial. In theory at least, it separated the men from the
boys, the competent from the incompetent. On the way to his master's
degree, a student might collect a bachelor's degree in recognition
of the fact that he was half-trained, or partially equipped. The
doctor's degree was somewhat different. Originally indistinguishable
from the master's the doctor's gradually emerged by a process
of escalation into a super magisterial role-first of all in the
higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine. It will come
as no surprise that the lawyers had a particular and early yen
for this special distinction.
These
graduations and distinctions are reflected in the quaint and colorful
niceties of academic dress.
Of particular interest is the cap or mortarboard. In the form
of the biretta it was the peculiar sign of the master. Its use
has now spread far beyond that highly select group to school girls
and choir boys and even to the nursery school. Sic transit
. . .
The
gown, of course, is the basic livery of the scholar, with its
clear marks of rank and status-the pointed sleeves of the bachelor,
the oblong sleeves of the master, the full sleeves and velvet
trimmings of the doctor. The doctors, too, may depart from basic
black and break out into many colors-Harvard crimson or Yale blue
or the scarlet splash of Oxford.
Color
is the very essence of the hood: color in the main body to identify
the university; color perhaps in the binding to proclaim the subject
of the degree-orange for engineering, gold for science, the baser
copper for economics, white for arts and letters, green for medicine,
purple for law, scarlet for theology, and so on. Size is a further
variable, as the hoods tend to lengthen from the three feet of
the bachelor to the four of the doctor. So the birds are known
by their plumage.
With
this color and symbolism, which is mediaeval though mutated, we
stage our brief moment of pageantry, paying homage to that ancient
community of scholars in whose shadow we stand, and acknowledging
our debt to the university as one of the great institutional constructs
of the Middle Ages. While looking back, however, we also celebrate
the achievements of this present generation of students and look
forward to the future of these our younger colleagues, whom we
now welcome to our midst.
David
C. Elliot
former Professor of History, Emeritus |
