The 453d Convocation
Address: “American Gothic or: Why Am I Dressed Like This?” Decisive events, turning points in a life, call for great ceremony and the usual speech. The decisiveness of this event is obvious enough. From this time on, whatever else happens to you, there is now something unalterably fixed in your past, something that no one can change, take away, diminish, or cancel: you have graduated (and you will always have graduated) from one of the world’s great universities. This difficult, rare accomplishment, a mark of learning, talent, and dedication achieved by such a very tiny fraction of the population, is now a permanent piece of the life history of all of you and is shared by all the parents, relatives, and friends who are a part of your lives. This great accomplishment is now yours forever, and, on behalf of all your teachers, I offer you the heartiest and warmest congratulations. We celebrate this feat with this elaborate ceremony, a rare modern, formal ritual, but the significance of the ceremony (and therewith the meaning of the event itself—what it means to have a university degree) is not as obvious as the greatness and distinction of the event. Hence the topic of the unavoidable speech. I mean: look at us, especially at me! Americans, or most anyone else apart from some Oxford dons and religious functionaries and judges, do not dress anything like this. Look at the building we are in: beautiful but not at all like the classrooms or laboratories where the University does its business. Think for a moment about the “graduation ceremony” itself. All modern developed nations have universities and some sort of procedure or exam for marking the end of study, but virtually no other nation in the world has graduation ceremonies (the exception is some in England). Students in Italy or France or Germany get a certificate in the mail (if that) or drink a beer in a cafe or a Kneipe (or a few beers), and that’s that. We Americans, uniquely in all the world, are crazy about such ceremonies. We even have them, sometimes with medieval caps and gowns and mitres and maces and processions and music, for graduation from kindergarten, first grade, fourth grade, eighth grade, high school, driving school, secretarial school, dog obedience school, and so on. So the remarks that I want to make about that significance will take their bearings from these two simple facts: that the officers of the University and the graduating students are dressed in essentially premodern and originally religious costumes, and that American universities mark this great rite of passage in a way that virtually no other nation in the world would ever contemplate. We are clearly trying to “say” something to each other with these vestments and in this setting, but what is it? In the first place, we are saying that you are all now part of something very old. This presumably helps emphasize why your achievement is so important and meaningful. We are repeating some acknowledgement of the attainment of something so indispensable in a worthwhile human life that some of its forms and rituals have endured the most violent, disruptive changes in human history. By dressing up in the attire of thirteenth-century priests and monks, complete with the hats and hoods and cowls of the medieval period, we are clearly trying to manifest to each other this sense of ancient importance and to acknowledge it properly. But how did it come about that we acknowledge the importance of this event, express its meaning, in this rather unusual and somewhat artificial way? Well, there is first of all the history of the university itself, obviously the most important factor in the form of this ritual. The first true university, teaching all seven liberal arts to students from all over Europe and especially emphasizing canon and civil law, was the university at Bologna, founded in the late eleventh century. Universities at Paris and Oxford were established in the next decade and throughout Germany thereafter. Since the faculty at these universities and most of the students were, for the next four or five hundred years or so, clerics, monks, and priests, it is to them that we owe this garb, the basic black robe of the priest. By the seventeenth century and especially with the founding of the first modern research university in Berlin in 1809, the theological dimension of universities had ceased to be central, but many students and faculty still tried to mark themselves off as in a special group and still continued to attend class and teach in what had by then, especially in England, become the basic university attire, the black gown. This brings us to an interesting American dimension of the story. In colonial times, traditional academic robes, or “habits” as they were called, were common practice for students and faculty, but by the end of the Civil War, the practice had died out and such robes were worn, if at all, only at commencement ceremonies, already much more popular here than in Europe. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, such ceremonies had grown quite common, and many colleges began discussing a way to formalize the symbolism of graduation, so that there could be a common meaning to the colors and vestments, so that anyone could tell from the attire the nature of someone’s degree and where they were from. Enter here one Mr. Gardner Cottrell Leonard, a young man of industry and sound commercial sense. Leonard had not been happy with the shape and fit of his graduation gown, worn at Williams College in 1883, and he spent the next year traveling across Europe, researching medieval attire and the design of gowns and hats. For the next ten years or so, he had developed and promoted the business of designing and supplying such gowns, and when a meeting of college officials was held at Columbia in 1895 to decide on uniform standards and establish an Inter-Collegiate Bureau of Academic Attire, Mr. Leonard was the technical expert and chief and very successful promoter of all this regalia, some of it borrowed from military traditions as well as clerical custom, some of it invented out of whole cloth. So here we are, dressed like thirteenth-century monks thanks partly to the marketing skills of the son of a dry goods manufacturer in Albany, New York, at the turn of the century. But the ceremony and dress are also due, of course, to some human need for a sense of permanence and some way of remembering and re-enacting such a sense. (We can note the same phenomenon in the popularity of wedding dresses. I often ask my undergraduates how many of the women would prefer to be married in a traditional ceremony—although the modern “tradition” is mostly a post–World War II phenomenon—complete with a formal white wedding gown, a dress that has no other role in the modern world and resembles some designer’s idea of a maiden princess in the late Middle Ages. Usually more than half or so vote resoundingly in favor of the dress, the veil, the train, the bridesmaids, and the procession, even though a great many would certainly describe themselves as, and certainly are, liberated, modern women and do not think of themselves as maiden princesses. The interesting question, in that case as well as this, is why we are attached to such a tradition if we cannot give its rationale or understand its origins.) It is also somewhat surprising that this public acknowledgement of the ancient origins of the university should be so important to Americans. We are a people famous throughout the world for rushing forward breathlessly through human history, re-inventing our basic institutions every few generations, pragmatically obsessed with the future, contemptuous of the past, willing to try anything new, alter anything old. We sometimes seem simply to hate the past: only in America could a debate about which books college students should read be framed as a debate about the influence of “dead white males,” as if books by dead people are already objectionable or give off some decaying odor. And we are willing to experiment so radically, change the way we do things so wildly. Only in America could the deep intimacies involved in the creating of new life be so quickly commercialized. (We are the only country in the world that allows genetic material for reproduction to be purchased and shipped, next-day delivery.) Yet nevertheless here we are, in our monk’s robes, and if one is in a skeptical and deflationary mood, one might think we are engaged in an essentially empty ritual. We might think that, as naïve Americans with very little in the way of traditions and rituals, we are easy marks for such things as holidays invented by Hallmark cards, religions invented yesterday by former talk-show hosts, and a medieval university tradition pieced together by a nineteenth-century dry goods merchant. Since the modern university, often more a training and research institute in the health sciences and other professions, can look like it has little to do with the aspirations of ancient universities, we might suspect that we are repeating the forms and rituals of long ago in an empty and meaningless repetition, mostly because we need to imbue this event with some ancient significance, even though we don’t know, don’t understand, what it is. We might look like a tribe that has emigrated to another tribe’s territory (in this case, the territory of our own past), making use of their sacred objects, tools, and buildings, but with no real comprehension and often in comically inappropriate ways. Yet this would be far too cynical an interpretation of the unusual character of this ritual (and it would make for a pretty depressing convocation address). This territory of the past that we are re-inhabiting is not like something from another planet. We still do think of university years as a time of reflection, separated off from—not wholly continuous with—daily life, a preparation for living, not just for making a living. (This is especially true in America, in contrast with Europe, where college life marks a more decisive rite of passage, a break with childhood and a mark of adult independence. Another reason for the greater emphasis on the ceremony.) The material taught here is taught by people who do nothing else but think it and teach it, as if there is something so intrinsically valuable in what is taught that it is worthy of a life’s dedication. There is still, in other words, something monastic about a university, especially a true university like the University of Chicago, and there is something astonishing, even miraculous, in the fact that in such a competitive, secular, pragmatic society, so many students and their parents still compete to win a place in a setting where they can read books they’ll likely only read once and study cultures and times that they will never again have occasion to think about. One of the things that we all still seem to have appreciated is a point made well by this little story about graduation rituals: that virtually every important modern practice, activity, or social interaction might not be what it immediately seems in the rush of the present, can itself even seem an empty ritual, and that simply understanding what we are doing when we vote, marry, command, submit to authority, trust a doctor, pay taxes, or bury a loved one is quite a difficult task, not to be as easily taken for granted as we must do in the rush of daily life. All of these activities and many more once meant something very different to the people who participated in them and could just as well come to mean something very different again. Putting on one of these gowns and rushing to graduation carry with them almost one thousand years of aspiration and meaning, but also a meaning and bearing in the present that is hidden, hard to extract, easy to overlook, and that needs to be recovered by reflection and argument. And my point is that that is not at all unusual: the same dense “saturation” with historical meaning is true of asserting a right, deciding to marry or have a child, preparing for a death, or sacrificing for a friend. Almost everything that we “wear” or all the conventions that we carry around with us are “worn” in the way we wear these robes today—this way rather than that way—because of a history that needs to be remembered and brought to bear on the present, that can be told in several different ways, and that is often forgotten. That there should be places, oases, eyes in the hurricane where, among other things, people are trying hard simply to remember how “we” got to be “us” is thus a necessary activity. Humans are the only animals who live historical lives, whose memories extend beyond their own lives, and who orient what they do from such memories. Without such memories, hurried lives of complete forgetfulness cease to be fully human. These “old clothes” partly help make and emphasize that point, a point itself worth remembering when you all recall probably the only day in your lives when you put on the black robes that embody a thousand years of human memory and aspiration. Welcome to the club of those who have learned how to remember and, again, congratulations.
Robert B. Pippin is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College. Summary The 453d convocation was held on Friday, August 28, 1998, in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Hugo F. Sonnenschein, President of the University, presided. A total of 438 degrees were awarded: 28 Bachelor of Arts in the College, 3 Bachelor of Science in the College and the Division of the Physical Sciences, 4 Master of Science in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 30 Master of Arts in the Division of the Humanities, 33 Master of Science in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 82 Master of Arts in the Division of the Social Sciences, 1 Master of Science in Teaching in the Division of the Social Sciences, 6 Master of Arts in the School of Social Service Administration, 120 Master of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business, 2 International Master of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business, 4 Master of Liberal Arts in the William B. and Catherine V. Graham School of General Studies, 11 Master of Arts in the Divinity School, 1 Master of Divinity in the Divinity School, 1 Master of Arts in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, 3 Master of Public Policy in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, 1 Doctor of Law in the Law School, 11 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 13 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Humanities, 24 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 45 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Social Sciences, 9 Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Business, 3 Doctor of Philosophy in the Divinity School, and 2 Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Social Service Administration. Robert B. Pippin, the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College, delivered the convocation address, “American Gothic or: Why Am I Dressed Like This?”
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