Wearing the Colors

Graduation regalia display a subtle range of tailoring and broad rainbow of hues; their roots date back centuries.

By Henry Petroski

Among the spectacles of a university commencement ceremony is the procession of faculty members wearing a variety of cap and gown styles and colors. The event’s printed program typically includes a note about the significance of the colors of hood linings and cap tassels, but there is seldom an explanation of why, for example, an engineering degree is signified by orange.

Academic regalia, like our places of higher learning themselves, have their roots in the Middle Ages, when religious institutions were the founts, repositories, and promulgators of scholarship and knowledge. Today’s gowns and hoods stem from the way monks dressed to keep warm while at work in their cold stone monasteries.

With the establishment of universities, the costume of the cleric became that of the academic. As these institutions matured, and their individuality and rivalry grew, their academic dress came to represent and distinguish schools and their scholarship. Caps, gowns, and hoods grew increasingly embellished and remote from the simplicity and uniformity of monastic attire.

American colleges and universities, which modeled themselves after their European predecessors, followed suit. This resulted in a hodgepodge of styles for the long robes that served not only to keep academics warm in winter but also to protect the clothes they wore underneath—and not incidentally to conceal social class distinctions that in principle had no relevance to scholarship.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the variety of academic dress across the United States led to the establishment of an intercollegiate commission charged with standardizing the apparel. Among its members was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, who had designed the graduation gowns for his Williams College class of 1887. He arranged to have them manufactured by the family firm of Cotrell & Leonard, which had been established by his grandfather in 1832 in Albany, New York, as a purveyor of hats—but had since expanded into selling a wide range of dry goods.

In an 1893 University Magazine article titled “The Cap and Gown in America,” Leonard laid the groundwork for standardizing academic dress across institutions by specifying for the different levels of scholarly achievement the materials, cut, and tailoring of gown and hood, as well as the trim colors designating the distinct fields of learning. Cotrell & Leonard reprinted the article a few years later in a booklet also containing Leonard’s “Progress of the Intercollegiate System,” which essentially described the code of academic dress agreed to by the commission. In time, the voluntary guidelines became widely adopted.

The standard head covering is the Oxford cap, more commonly known as the mortarboard. Originally, the square, stiff, fabric-covered board was attached to a shaped skull cap, but Leonard’s preference for a more flexible cap, which could be folded flat when not being worn, eventually came to dominate. The only distinguishing feature allowed for the doctoral cap was that it could be of velvet and sport a gold tassel.

In practice, master’s and doctoral gowns and hoods became increasingly paired with academic tams, which in spite of the name are derived not from the Scottish Tam o’ Shanter but from the soft, round Tudor bonnet. Whereas the modern master’s cap may be four-, six-, or eight-sided, the doctoral one is expected to be octagonal.

Leonard’s intercollegiate code covered details from the style of sleeve for gowns signifying different degrees to the length of a hood (three feet for the bachelor’s and four for the doctoral), trim width (no more than six inches), and lining (reflecting an institution’s own colors). The rigidly specified trim colors were said to be “based on historic reasons,” but only a few could be convincingly explained.

White signified arts and sciences, after the fur trimming on the hood of an Oxbridge bachelor of arts degree recipient. Green was supposedly chosen to represent medicine because it suggested the curative herbs used in medieval times. The sciences were assigned the color “gold yellow,” which, according to the American Council on Education, stood for “the wealth which scientific research has produced.”

Originally, there was no specific color assigned to engineering; fin de siècle Yale was not atypical in using the golden yellow of science also for its engineering degrees. However, according to a Cotrell & Leonard trade catalog, by 1910 engineering did have its own color—orange. Evidently, it was chosen because it is close to the gold of science and had not yet been assigned to any other field of scholarship.

 

Henry Petroski is distinguished professor emeritus of civil engineering at Duke University.
Image Courtesy of Catherine Petroski