Thinking about the notion of academic robes at graduation ceremony. From time-to-time the idea of academical dress gets attacked for being irrelevant and outdated. I’d like to argue instead that there is an important radical signficance behind the idea of dressing in academic robes for graduation.
Over the last fifty years there has been a pressure in society towards the idea that the only acceptable form of formal dress is that associated with the business community. Increasingly the distinctive formal dress-codes associated with various professions and things of value in society have been rubbished as irrelevant in “the modern world”; distinctive modes of dress associated with learning, scholarship, teaching, the law, religion, et cetera have been put under pressure. We might want superficially to hurrah this as a victory for egalitarianism; why should practitioners of such things get the chance to lord it over “the rest of us” by distinctive forms of dress.
This might be acceptable if the alternative was a class- and profession- neutral mode of formal dress. However this is not what has happened. What would people wear to an occasion such as graduation if academic dress were to be deprecated? I imagine that the vast majority would wear some tedious grey suit redolent of years of tedium in the accountancy profession. The mode of dress chosen would no longer represent learning, nor would it represent personal success; it would have the subtle smell of the idea that the only success worth having is that represented by business, and that we celebrate success by shrouding ourselves in the dress associated with that activity. “We are all businessmen/women now”.
The situation is rapidly becoming similar to that of mediaeval europe, where membership of the church was a prerequisite for any other profession, and therefore priestly robes became the standard formal dress later diversifying into academic robes, barristers’ gowns, et cetera. It was incomprehensible that someone could become a professional in some other field without being a priest first. We are in a similar situation today with regard to business; it is becoming increasingly difficult to assert an identity as a lawyer or academic or whatever without the implication that one is “really” a business person, just “trading” in the “law business” or “university business” or whatever. This is subtly supported by the modes of dress which are deemed “acceptable” in society. The use of academic robes in graduation ceremonies is a healthy cock-a-snoop at this bland uniformity.