Tams are often worn by PhDs- some universities have the tam as a standard part of their regalia, for others it is optional and you would wear a mortarboard instead. I’m switching to a tam this year- they look so cool!
I have never seen a “hood” worn like a jacket hood- it is always draped.
Possibly relevant: The official Academic Costume Guide, from the American Council on Education.
Elendil’s Heir, that “choir habit” is the pastor’s, and the hood he’s wearing is for his divinity degree. I don’t think it would be appropriate for a lay member of the choir to wear an academic hood with the choir robe.
The choirmaster and others sometimes wear non-divinity-related degree academic hoods from time to time. We can be very High Church sometimes.
They do? When I graduated in 1988, we wore mortarboards. I remember because the architecture and aerospace engineering majors used to customize them. And a few grads had messages on the top of the mortarboard (“Hi Mom” and so forth). We also didn’t walk onto stage. As I remember, we stood as our name was called out. And the robe was made of some really cheap fabric that fell apart immediately after the ceremony.
Yeah, that’s right. Other than as a gag, I’ve never seen anybody actually put an academic hood up on their head. I have my Ph.D. hood hanging in the closet at home - I can give it a try, but I doubt it would really lay well; the fabrics appear to have been cut to suit the thing’s modern role, rather than its traditional one. It’d be kinda like trying to use a modern necktie as a functional bib, or something…
Typically Ph.D. recipients march in at commencement hoodless, and as they take the stage to receive their diplomas they get the hood draped over their neck and shoulders, as well.
In case anybody following along isn’t clear on what the hell we’re talking about, here is a pretty good photo showing a doctoral hood as it is traditionally worn. Bachelor’s and master’s hoods are the same idea, but smaller. Chronos’s link goes into detail on the symbologies behind the colors; the short answer is that the velvet trim denotes the discipline, while the satin “inner lining” is school colors. Many institutions place their own twists on it, though.
Do most participants have to purchase the regalia now? Back in the day only Ph.D. candidates did, IIRC, but I just looked at my school’s commencement site and they mentioned purchasing the garments. And this is a CSU campus where no Ph.D. programs are offered.
When I received my Ph.D., we had a separate hooding ceremony the day before graduation. For law school, everyone just rented them and wore them to graduation (I wore my Ph.D. hood instead).
If a mortarboard is worn correctly, no one should be able to read the “hi, mom” that you have written on top anyway. The board is correctly worn parallel to the ground. It is so tacky to see someone graduate with a mortarboard on the back of his head.
I can take cowbells, airhorns, backflips…anything but that.
At my undergrad alma mater (okay, so it’s Agnes Scott, which is the tiniest women’s college around so we can do these kinds of things) every graduating student got hooded by the dean, who also moved her tassel. Also, you got to go up on stage all by yourself and they didn’t call the next person until you’d shaken all the hands and kissed all the babies.
It was kind of a shock when I then got my masters’ at USC and there wasn’t even a rehearsal! They called the names like it was an auction and told us three or four times in the instructions that there will be NO DALLYING. At the same time they went on and on about how deliciously traditional it was that we actually got to walk across a stage instead of, I dunno, having somebody say “Okay, all these people on the floor have graduated!”
Also, at ASC when you got that folder it had your actual diploma in it!
Then I take it you wouldn’t be down with my getting my classmates to quickmarch into the arena, late, going "HUT! HUT! HUT!’ then doing some fancy drillwork.
just kidding!
Many graduations are held in outdoor stadia, and will therefore have most of the audience some distance above the graduates. So unless you’re advocating that the mortarboard be worn parallel to the ground, facing downwards, someone’s going to be able to read it.
We had both. As mentioned earlier, the hoods weren’t worn over the head, just draped down over the back, with the mortar board on top.
And yeah, I remember at least one guy had a customized mortarboard. He rigged up a small solar panel and motor with a switch in his hand. When he pressed the switch, the tassel would twirl about.
There are also rules for the number of sides. Masters get to use the hexagonal tams, Ph.D.s the octagonal one.
Oh, and some place out in CA (I want to say Berkeley, maybe LA) uses something like a stovepipe hat for its Ph.D.s.
There was a professor at my alma mater who had gone somewhere (some Jesuit school, I think?) where they had a green gown and a hat that looked kind of like a giant eagle had crapped all over his head. In gold.
Yeah, faculty who got their doctorates outside of the US often stick out like sore thumbs on commencement day. Caltech, as you might expect, has a good number of them. Some of those English universities have some pretty cool-looking ceremonial duds…
Got a cite for this? I was doing some research on this myself, recently, and everything I could find said that the number of sides on a tam carried no particular significance, other than aesthetic taste.
I heard there were a lot of academic hoods in the 1920s around Chicago’s Northwestern.
D&R