All dressed up?

For the remainder of this week, I shall be enjoying my university’s graduation ceremonies. I share with my Chancellor, Sir Ian Wood, the task of presiding over these events (we divide them up between us), and I speak at all of them. Over the years between Dublin City University and Robert Gordon University, I have presided at maybe 170 ceremonies and shaken some 31,000 hands in the process; often experiencing the sensation and occasionally the pain of the graduands’ hand jewellery, and always marvelling at the improbable footwear in which amazingly many of them manage to negotiate their way across the stage. But no matter how often I have done it, the spirit of these occasions always carries me along.

Ten years ago in DCU one of our academic colleagues made a formal request to discontinue, for staff at least, the requirement to wear academic robes for graduations. He argued that this was an outdated practice not in tune with the times or indeed with the ethos of the university. We had a lively debate on the DCU Academic Council (the final decision-making body for academic matters) and the proposal was overwhelmingly defeated. While the proposal didn’t cover students, I canvassed their opinions anyway and, again, found the mood totally hostile to any relaxing of the rules. What I did change in DCU at the time was the somewhat strange and certainly sexist requirement (generally applied in Irish universities) for women only to wear mortar boards at graduations: in DCU it became optional for both men and women.

So, even in universities such as RGU and DCU, which build their strategies on a non-traditional outlook, formal dress at graduations is still seen as not just appropriate but necessary. This in turn reminds us that rites of passage are rites, or rituals, which need to generate a sense of occasion and emotion. Higher education is changing rapidly; the ceremonies that mark each student’s success probably not.

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