Page 64 - Graduation Commencement_2021

Eastern Gateway Community College
The Symbols of Learning

The commencement procession today, in this country and abroad, is a pageant,
alive and bright with the dress and ceremony inherited from the medieval
universities of the 11th and 12th centuries.
Academic life as we know it today began in the Middle Ages - with Bologna and
Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Louvain - first in the
Church, then in the guilds. The teaching guild was the Guild of the Master of
Arts, where the Bachelor was the apprentice of the Master and the dress was
the outward sign of privilege and responsibility. The dress made visible, in
color and pattern, the unity of men of like purpose. Twelfth century records of
Oxford University carry this justification for academic dress: “It is honourable
and in accordance with reason that clerks to whom God has given an advantage
of the lay folk in their adornments within, should likewise differ from the lay folk
outwardly in dress.”

The principal features of academic dress are three: the gown, the cap, and the
hood.

The Gown.
The flowing gown comes from the 12th century. Many think it was worn in
olden times as protection against the cold of unheated buildings. It has become
symbolic of the democracy of scholarship, for it completely covers any dress
of rank or social standing underneath. It is black with pointed sleeves for the
Bachelor’s Degree; long, closed sleeves for the Master’s Degree, with a slit for
the arm; and round open sleeves for the Doctor’s degree. The gown worn for
Bachelor’s or Master’s Degrees has no trimmings. The gown for the Doctorate
degree is faced down the front with velvet and has three bars of velvet across
the sleeves, in the color distinctive of the faculty or discipline to which the
degree pertains.

The Cap.
The freed slave in Ancient Rome won the privilege of wearing a cap, and so
the academic cap is a sign of the freedom of scholarship and the responsibility
and dignity with which scholarship endows the wearer. Old poetry records the
cap of scholarship as square to symbolize the book, although some authorities
claim that the mortar board is the symbol of the masons, a privileged guild.