What is the status of nylon rabbit's fur?

Does your tippet overlap your liripip?

While these questions may not loom large in the minds of today's graduates, they are of the utmost importance to expert observers of that short-lived phenomenon, the annual display of Doctoral Plumage.

What do the myriad hues, tints, textures, and trappings of the doctoral gown signify? Is there order to be drawn from the apparent chaos? A glance at Peterson's Guide to Doctoral Plumage of the Old World would seem to say there is not, that even the origin of the species is shrouded in mystery.

Mason's Sackcloth

One anonymous legend cites a wise old Greek who decked his students out in mason's sackcloth robes with mortarboards because "their destiny is to build. Some will build cities, some will build livesperhaps one of them will build an empire. But all will be builders on the foundation of knowledge."

More solid scientific research dates the origins of Old World academic dress to the mid-12th century, at the University of Paris, where it evolved from ecclesiastical garb into the varied and colorful regalia that we know today.

Early on, the most splendid costumes were reserved for the higher-ranking degrees. An Oxford Bachelor of the 15th century was allowed only lamb's wool or badger's fur to line his academic hood; sendal (silk), miniver (ermine), and tartaran (tartan) were the trappings of Masters and Doctors.

Evolutionarily speaking, academic caps and gowns remained relatively stable while the hood showed the greatest change. The tripartite hood consisted of the tippet (the underlying piece that lies flat on the wearer's back), the hood proper (which bears the colors and trim), and the liripip (a sort of vestigial tail on the end of the hood).

Since the hood is the main indication of the bearer's degree and institution, it proliferated and diversified wildly throughout Old World Universities like tropical fish in isolated lagoons, giving the naturalist little upon which to base a coherent taxonomy.

In 1882 the Reverend Thomas William Hood, Vicar of Eldensfield, tried to list the burgeoning costumes of the time in his slender (although little-read) volume Degrees, Gowns (etc.) of British, Colonial, Indian and American Universities. A sampling of the hoods listed therein shows little order, but a rich and varied selection.

The University of Glasgow, for example, specifies for its B.Sc.a hood of "black silk lined with gold colored silk (color of Whin BlossomUlex europae)," while its LL.B. requires a black silk hood, Cambridge pattern, lined with Venetian red (color of Clove).

Botanist Asa Gray might have recognized the color of Whin Blossoms at 20 paces, but the layman would have been hard pressed to find anything in these hoods that specifically indicated "Glasgow."

In addition to exotic tints, fur was used by many of the colleges and universities to obtain a striking and majestic effect. The University of Edinburgh, the Reverend Hood notes, offered a B.D. hood resplendent in black silk, lined with purple silk, bordered with fur, while McGill College in Montreal lined its entire rich mauve B.Sc. hood with rabbit's fur. The adaption of fur to academic hoods is a fortuitous one for the naturalist, since it facilitates doctoral identification.

Fur Controversy

Fur became a topic of conversation at Oxford when horrified dons discovered that tailors had begun using nylon fur instead of ermine or rabbit for fur linings and trim during World War II. Further examination also revealed that since academic hues had never been accurately specified, jarring mutant colors had begun to appear about the University.

Appalled, the head clerk of the University Registry and the proprietor of an Oxford Tailor shop collaborated on a compendium of sartorial statutes. Handwritten on parchment and accompanied by swatches of materials, their leatherbound volume now reposes in the University Archives. It is their considered opinion that "any fur on an academic hood ought to come from an indigenous animal."

If the Oxford handbook appears to be simply the product of British fastidiousness, consider the incident of Adam Clayton Powell's crow's feet.

Harvard University, alone of all the world's universities, uses embroidered crow's feet of various colors on the lapels of its gowns (double for earned degrees, triple for honorary) to indicate its different faculties. When an eagle-eyed Harvard alumnus spotted a photograph in his local Albany, N.Y., newspaper of Adam Clayton Powell in a robe with crow's feet, letters flew. From the Old Grad to the University Marshal's office; from the Marshal's Office to Cotrell and Leonard, purveyors of academic apparel; and finally, from the Old Grad to Adam Clayton Powell.

The Marshal's Office maintained that other colleges do use crow's feet, Cotrell and Leonard said no, it happens that only Harvard has them. Adam Clayton Powell entered the opinion that the embroidery represented the three tips of the cross.

But the Old Grad had the last word. "I was about to call the tips Harvard, Yale and Princeton," he wrote, "when I counted again and found there were five of them." It was a Harvard robe.

In contrast to the Old World profusion of colors, furs, and furbelows, the New World Order of the toga scholastica, while not easily recognized, at least has some order in its speciation.

In 1895 an intercollegiate conference on academic gowns was held at Columbia University (with Harvard abstaining). Certain standards were set then and, while there were some revisions in 1932 and again in 1959, the complexities of the doctoral gown, Genus americus, can now be unraveled.

Harvard did finally conform to the academic code. The Corporation suggested in 1897 that all Harvard hoods should be lined in crimson, and recommended that the distinctive crow's feet be used. Because of President Eliot's antipathy to academic finery, these suggestions were not adopted until 1902. The crimson Harvard Doctoral gown was not voted in by the Corporation until 1955.

The New World rules enable the viewer to tell the college conferring the degree, the level of the degree, and the faculty awarding the degree by a glance at the costume. The colors (one or more) of the hood lining represent the conferring college; the color of the velvet border (or the crow's feet in Harvard's case) designates the branch of knowledge; the length of the hood and the width of the velvet border indicate the level of the degree. The borders may be two, three, or five inches wide on the corresponding hoods of three, three and a half, and four feet respectively for the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees.

28 Varieties

Like Howard Johnson's ice cream, the scholar recognizes 28 separate varieties of faculties designated by border colors, including Nile green for Podiatry-Chiropody, lilac for Dentistry, and appropriately, maize for Agriculture. For those naturalists with a quick eye or a tape measure and a pickpocket's hand it should be a simple matter to tell that the gentleman with a three-and-a-half-foot hood with a black lining with a three-and-a-half-inch trim is a Forestry major M.A. from Multonomah School of the Bible.

Further clues exist in the construction of the gowns, which come with three specific cuts of sleeve denoting the three degree levels. Some colleges use the soft beret or biretta, but the prevailing style of cap is the traditional square mortarboard, decorated with a long tassel.

Contrary to popular belief, it matters not whether the tassel is worn to the left or the right of the hat. As a spokesman for the specialists Cotrell and Leonard pointed out, "A gust of wind could change your academic standing in a moment."

Doctors may wear a gold tassel, although they are seldom used at Harvard. Harvard presidents in the past have worn gold tassels.

While observers may not be able to identify each species of the doctoral regalia in today's Commencement, they can reflect that student and professor alike are paying homage to more than 700 years of academic tradition.

E.B. Boatner '63