Global Governance graduate Du Ran with the Head of Division International Studies,wearing the UNNC MA gown: black gown, Edinburgh style black hood with light blue and carlett lining.
Saturday saw the first graduation ceremony for our MA Global Governance students. In black gowns with black hoods which are lined in light blue students received the congratulations of the President of UNNC, Professor Yang Fujiya and the Provost, Professor Roger Woods, as well as of their Head of Division, Dr. Catherine Goetze.
For some the professoral procession into the hall at the sound of Georg Friedrich Haendel’s Water Music seems like a peculiar form of carnival, for others it constitutes one of the most solemn moments of their lives. But where does this tradition of procession, congregation, and gowns come from?
Dr. May Tan-Mullins from the Division International Studies, wearing the UNNC PhD gown: carlett gown with light blue lining, Edinburgh style carlett hood with light blue and white lining.
When the first universities were founded in Europe in the Middle Ages (Bologna 1088, Oxford around 1170, Paris around 1200, Salamanca in 1218, Heidelberg in 1386, St. Andrews in 1413 – just to name a few), European societies were divided in internally and externally hierarchically structured professional corporations and guilds. Corporations and guilds were what the modern sociologist Marcel Mauss would call “total” institutions as they defined the lives of their members in all aspects, not only with respect to their profession but also with respect to their marriage and children, their norms and behavior, and even their clothing. Vestimentary codes were omnipresent. Each guild had its own dress and within each guild dresses were distinguished according to the status of the bearer. Additional signs would furthermore indicate local origins, marital status, relationship to the King or religious confession. The dress code would include also the insignia of the craft which were heralded on buildings, furniture or, evidently, on the dresses themselves. These insignia would be tools such as square and compass for carpenters which later on became famously associated with freemasonry, or the hammer for blacksmiths; there would also be in Germany for instance the Brezel for bakers. Furthermore, the feudal division of society defined each professional group with respect to their distance to the King and to God (or the Pope and Bishop as God’s representation), hence, the guilds and corporations defined each individual’s place in the overall society. Dress codes were important to clearly designate the belonging of an individual to his community and to its social status.
Universities were guilds just like any other. In the words of the French medieval historian Jacques Le Goff, the founding of universities represented the professionalization of thinking and teaching. Universities were guilds of teachers and corporations of students. Graduation ceremonies were the ritual admission of new members to the guild itself and to the different statuses within the guild. As all others, universities too were subdivided in three layers of apprenticeship, companions and masters. In the Middle Ages masters, companions and apprentices were not only bound to each other by a relationship of seniority but also of personalized obligation. Masters did not only decide what apprentices and companions would learn but also when and who they would marry, where and when they would settle, how much they would earn and be allowed to keep, what roles they were to take over in the community, and also, importantly, who would to be punished for ill behavior and how. The worst punishment, even worse than any harsh physical punishment, would be the exclusion from the guild which withdrew protection from the individual and made him an outlaw. These individuals would often be physically marked as outlaws, through branding or tattoos for instance or, like in the case of German carpenters, through ripping off the earring they would have been conferred in their companion graduation ceremony. In German “Schlitzohr” (slit ear) is still a common word for swindler and rascal.
Of all this, our current graduation ceremonies are only distant memories. We do not live in a feudal society anymore, dress codes are now dictated by H&M and Prada and not our relationship to the King and to God, and failure to obey the rules of the profession do not result in being outlawed anymore, even though deontological codes are still very important (note that for instance proven cases of plagiarism may result in exclusion from university and that other universities will refuse registering students who have been excluded on the grounds of plagiarism). Yet, even more interestingly, academic graduation ceremonies have survived in those societies who either never had the tradition of guilds like the US-American society or who have very early in modern history destroyed guilds and corporations like the British society. In Germany and France where guilds and corporations were only abolished in the past 100 respectively 200 years and where universities are still clearly marked by the hierarchies of professors, doctors and students, there are no official graduation ceremonies like that we witnessed last Saturday.
1968 student revolt in Germany
In fact, the universities of Paris and Heidelberg were, in 1968, even the starting point of the radical student movement which led not only to a profound rethinking of the role of knowledge and teaching in universities but also to the abolishment of gown processions. “Unter den Talaren, der Muff von 1000 Jahren” (The gowns of a 1000 year’s pong) was the battle cry of the student revolt.
What has remained hence is not so much the hierarchical idea of graduation, the initiation of an individual into its specific place in a given hierarchy within a guild, but rather the more general and egalitarian idea of admitting a new member to the community. Contemporary graduation ceremonies are more about honoring the achievements of the students and celebrating their result than about fitting an individual into a hierarchy and set of rules. The solemn feeling comes from the satisfaction over successful studies and not from the grace accorded to the student by the corporation. It is a students’ celebration now. And so all staff of the Division International Studies congratulates all UNNC MA graduates!!!