Degree Conferral Customs

yeah, its the same in Trinity.

Although I heard that the reason behind male graduates not wearing them was due to the simple fact that many of them were discusted that the universities allowed women to graduate. So, to mark this discust and as a mark of protest, men broke the custom of wearing the mortarboards.

I didn't wear one either

A little know fact: Women don't 'have' to wear mortarboards in the NUI colleges. They are part of NUI academic dress, but there used to be a paragraph in the official NUI regulations which stated that graduands must wear the appropriate hood and gown of the degree with which they are to be conferred. No mention of hats, hence they are optional for everyone. The regs have been changed recently, but I would imagine this remains the same. There should be a copy of the old ones at least in the official NUI calendar (not the individual college ones). TCD regulations do state that women must wear them though.

There are many myths about why only women wear mortarboards in some colleges. The 'ceiling to educational achievement' and 'men throwing hats in the river when women were admitted' versions are urban legends, which you'll often hear attributed to Trinity, Cambridge, Durham and St. Andrews amongst other colleges.

Perhaps the most likely explanation is that women traditionally kept hats on while indoors, but men removed theirs and simply stopped wearing them. Up to the 1940s men did wear them in the NUI colleges.

I've also seen men wear them when being conferred with honorary degrees in the NUI, but female academic staff rarely wear them.

Mortarboards do not necessarily signify academic achievement (hoods do), but membership of a university. Some colleges prescribe them (or used to) as part of undergraduate academic dress to be worn at formal occasions in college-Oxford would be a good example of this. These days their female students may now carry their mortarboards instead of wear them (women had taken to bowing instead of curtseying at their graduations and mortarboards had a tendency to fall off). They also have a soft floppy square hat which women may wear as an alternative-invented by their first women's colleges in the early 20th century as an alternative to the mortarboard.

Hope you both enjoy your day stewarpm.

I could be imagining this, but I think I remember looking up a few 1960s TCD calendars once and not seeing any mention of caps for women. As I recall it was from the 70s that this was included in the academic dress regulations in the calendar (though obviously they were worn before that). At any rate mortarboards have been around since at least the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, long before women were admitted to universities, so the glass ceiling theory isn't very credible.

At this stage I have seen the new NUI regs (or at least those in the latest calendar) and though they are included, there's still no mention of women having to wear mortarboards or men not wearing them. I happened to be passing by as some grads were walking in to their ceremony in NUIG a few weeks ago and counted at least three hatless women and surprisingly one guy with mortarboard. And of course as they are listed as part of NUI AD any guy who wants to wear one is perfectly entitled to do so.

jank wrote:

Also I know PHD's wear a red coat while sometimes a master student wears it aswell but sometimes not

Any more info regarding this?

As far as I know the only masters in Ireland who wear anything other than black are Open University grads who wear bright blue gowns. I don't know the origin of red for doctors but it's another of those things that goes back hundreds of years. In a lot of the newer colleges, especially outside Ireland, the UK and some former UK colonies, doctors tend to wear black or other colours. PhDs in some of the nordic countries don't have hoods or gowns at all, just evening wear worn with a top hat and sword.

I'm also intrigued by all of this. My girlfriend did some investigating of the origins to try and see if it's definitively sexist but the best explanation to be found was the one about men not wearing hats indoors while women did.

I had another idea on top of this. I went to Trinity and during my graduation ceremony there were a couple of points where Amen is said (the ceremony is in Latin). I was thinking that perhaps graduation in Ireland was conducted in something of a religious ceremony and therefore, like how men cannot wear a hat in church, they could not do so for graduation. Just an idea.

For what it's worth, the new illustrated NUI academic dress regulations (PDF) published since the original discussion state:

Caps are an integral part of academic dress for all those being conferred with the Degrees of Doctor and Higher Doctor. For all other qualifications the wearing of caps has become optional, although in practice many conferees choose to wear caps.

Bonnets are worn at doctoral level, so mortarboards are optional for all other graduands.