THE ACADEMIC REGALIA

The academic regalia worn at college commencement exercises dates back to the Middle Ages, when scholarship was usually associated with a church or monastery. The influence of the church could be noted by the regular costume worn by the faculty and students, which consisted of clerical garb borrowed largely from the monastic dress of their day. Over the years, the simple hooded gown, or cassock, worn during this era evolved into a distinctive academic costume.

By the end of the 16th century, English scholars and students added birettas, floppy hats similar to berets, to their academic regalia. As fashionable educators tried to outdo each other with larger birettas, these hats finally had to be stuffed with cardboard to keep them from falling into their faces, thus giving birth to the concept of the mortarboard.

By the end of the 19th century, American universities and colleges standardized their academic costume, following the English tradition. Today, the distinctive caps, gowns, and hoods worn at college and university functions denote the institution granting the degree, the field of learning in which the degree was earned, and the level of the degree.

Today’s gown is usually black in color. The master’s gown has long pouchlike sleeves that were once probably used to carry books, while the doctoral gown is faced with panels of velvet down the front and three bars of velvet across each sleeve.

The hoods of monastic times have remained, becoming decorative symbols of the attainment of higher degrees. Worn around the neck and hanging down the back, the hood is emblematic of the nature and source of the degree held. The colors in the hood lining are the colors of the school conferring the degree—orange and blue for Pepperdine. The color of the border indicates the specialization attained by the wearer—light blue for education and white and royal blue for psychology. These colors are used for the edging of all hoods, and may also be used for the velvet facing and sleeve bars of the doctoral gown and the tassel on the master’s cap.

The modern cap may be a square mortarboard or a round, soft, flat velvet hat, which is reserved for the doctoral graduate. Both types bear a tassel, which may be black, gold, or colored, according to the scholarly field of the wearer.

Today’s academic regalia is profoundly symbolic of the reverence that is still held for the pursuit of knowledge and the achievement of scholarship.

As a Christian university, Pepperdine affirms:

That God is

That God is revealed uniquely in Christ

That the educational process may not, with impunity, be divorced from the divine process

That the student, as a person of infinite dignity, is the heart of the educational enterprise

That the quality of student life is a valid concern of the University

That truth, having nothing to fear from investigation, should be pursued relentlessly in every discipline

That spiritual commitment, tolerating no excuse for mediocrity, demands the highest standards of academic excellence

That freedom, whether spiritual, intellectual, or economic, is indivisible

That knowledge calls, ultimately, for a life of service