Academic Robes Research Articles

ID Asks/Kenneth Werner

ID Asks/Kenneth Werner

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

The Double Agent: NOB / RD

Abstract This essay explores the close relationship between the poet Robert Duncan and Norman O. Brown. Their long friendship and shared intellectual interests were generative for both, allowing Brown at one point to remark that the “poetry of Robert Duncan had made the writing of Love's Body possible.” Duncan responded in kind by featuring Brown in “Santa Cruz Propositions,” written while the poet was in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That poem draws on Brown's theories of Eros as a daemonic power to criticize his (Duncan's) old friend, Denise Levertov, whose anti-war poetry he felt had grown shrill and hectoring. At the same time, the poem attempts to draw out Brown's Dionysian, poetic potential. Duncan made Norman O. Brown an unwitting co-conspirator in this effort by attempting to reveal the naked poet beneath the academic robes. Much of the essay is based on correspondence between the two figures.

The Need for Customized Academic Dresses for the Tertiary Institutions in Ghana: A Study of Kumasi Technical University Community

Issues have been raised about the identity challenges that seem to have characterized most tertiary institutions in Ghana especially the Technical Universities as regards the academic gown usage during academic ceremonies. The usual practice is that Institutions who do not own the gowns hire from the traditional universities whose aims and philosophies are often at variance with them and in effect results in identity crisis. The aim of this paper was to investigate the issues concerning how gowns are used in the study area and the design expectations for befitting customized gowns. To do that descriptive research with cross sectional survey was undertaken in the study area using convenience and simple random sampling techniques and data were collected from 400 respondents. The findings were that most respondents recognised the existence of the issues pertinent to the use of the academic ensembles that amount to identity challenges and admitted that these issues need to be addressed by acquiring befitting customised academic dresses. Additionally, respondents were almost unanimously in favour of the various gown components designed to portray the philosophies and traditions of the institution and its faculties, be of good quality material, exquisitely sewn and being durable. Respondents indicated the need for deans of faculties to have special academic costumes specific to their status and positions and in all, they were of the view that gowns must have an indigenous traditional touch. It is thus recommended that all academic institutions in Ghana should acquire their own academic dresses which are in tune with their philosophies and traditions and capable of visibly differentiating them from their sister institutions. This outcome will help policy makers in their quest for the appropriate academic robes for their various institutions and faculties and also whip up interest for acquiring befitting academic robes. It will as well add to the body of knowledge for the use by the academia and other interested researchers.

Thinking Literature

Some might have to choose positions in a bid to intervene in this fascinating and rich discussion between two erudite philosophers of literature (among other things); I opt to choose my role. Doffing my academic robes, which often feel too tight in any case, I don my creative cap, and relate to just one core aspect of the book Thinking Literature Across Continents: What is literature? As a novelist and a poet, when I look at serious discussions of literature, I notice that most definitions fall into one of two large groups: either the theorist defines literature as something that cuts across languages, cultures, and texts, or the theorist extracts the quality of literature from specific texts, situates them in specific languages and cultures. In other words, it seems that definitions of literature tend to prioritize either the matter of “life” (to use a general expression loved by blurb writers) or the matter of “language,” both of which, it can be argued, combine to provide us with the material of literature. Literature, after all, is always in language about some kind of “life,” real or imagined, past or future, and even animate or inanimate.

Deepening the Heart of Wisdom: A Course in Buddhist and Christian Contemplative Practices and Dialogue

Deepening the Heart of Wisdom: A Course in Buddhist and Christian Contemplative Practices and Dialogue Wakoh Shannon Hickey and C. Denise Yarbrough A dozen seminarians and a professor file into a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled lounge in the main building of their campus. The left half of the room features a padded window seat beneath a bay of tall, leaded-glass windows, a coffee table, and a group of upholstered chairs around the table, facing the windows. On the right side of the room is a paneled wall, featuring painted portraits of white men in academic robes, hung well above eye level. On the floor, lining this wall, is a tidy row of rectangular black mats, each surmounted by round black zafu or a meditation bench. Nearest the double entry doors, two or three chairs face the wall. Opposite the door is a marble fireplace and mantle, also surmounted by a portrait. A few feet in front of this, in the center of the room, is a small wooden table, on which the most prominent object is a cube-shaped white pedestal. Upon the pedestal rests a miniature carved wooden chair, which is empty. To the viewer’s left of the chair is a small vase of flowers; to the right is a lit white candle. In front of the pedestal are a small, glass vessel of water and two censers: one a round ceramic bowl full of packed gray ash; the other a lacquer box with two compartments. The larger compartment is also full of packed ash; upon the ash rests a small, glowing charcoal. The smaller compartment contains a neat pile of incense composed of tiny wood chips and fragrant granules. As the students enter the room, each steps through the open left side of the doorway (the right side of the door is closed). They enter on the left foot, take two steps forward, press palms together in a prayer-like gesture called gasshō, and bow from the waist in the direction of the empty chair. Each then curls the fingers of the left hand around the thumb, places the hand against the solar plexus, rests the right palm on top of the left fist, and walks forward, keeping the row of upholstered chairs on the left and the altar table containing the empty chair on the right. Just beyond the table, each person turns right and passes behind it with a slight bow, then proceeds to one of the chairs or zafus along the wall on the right side of the room. Arriving at a seat, each [End Page 83] makes gasshō, bows to the seat, turns 180 degrees clockwise, bows in gasshō toward the windows on the opposite side of the room, sits on a zafu, and turns clockwise toward the wall or steps around the back of a chair to sit facing the wall. The people settle themselves into upright postures, hands folded in their laps in the “cosmic mudra,” the fingers of the left hand on top of the fingers of the right, with thumb-tips touching gently. They place the tips of their tongues on their upper palates, behind their front teeth, and direct their gazes downward toward a point on the wall in front of them. They then bring their attention to their breaths, as they flow in and out. A professor, wearing black robes, enters the room in a similar way but sidesteps to the right, in front of the altar, holding a burning stick of incense between the fingers of both hands. She bows again, sidesteps left, walks toward the altar, sidesteps to the right in front of it, touches the base of the incense stick to her forehead and places it upright in the round censer with the fingers of her right hand, making gasshō with her left. With her right hand she gathers a pinch of powdered incense, elevates it to her forehead, and sprinkles it on the burning coal in the rectangular censer, then adds a second pinch. Tendrils of fragrant smoke curl upward and dissipate. Making gasshō with both hands, she sidesteps again to the right, bows, turns clockwise toward the door, and walks...

The Academic Robes of Graduates of the University of Cambridge from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

The aim of this article is to examine the developments in the academic dress of the graduates of the University of Cambridge from the end of the eighteenth century (where Hargreaves-Mawdsley ended his account) to the present day. (Undergraduate dress has been largely a matter for college regulation at Cambridge, and thus does not come within our remit.) Without doubt, the most important development was the complete revision of the scheme in 1934, of which a very biased account is to be found in Franklyn’s Academical Dress of 1970; it does however have useful transcripts of the various Reports of the Council of Senate. This article will concentrate on the colours of the hoods and robes, and to an extent on the styles of the black gowns, but will not enter into discussion of the variations in the hood shape. We ignore also the ‘business’ or Congregation dress of doctors, as by about 1880 it had virtually disappeared from ordinary use. [Excerpt].

Onward Howard Kelly, Marching as to War

IN 1905, THE PROMINENT ARTIST JOHN SINGER SARGENT was commissioned to paint a portrait of the four founding physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital: William Welch, William Osler, William Halsted, and Howard Kelly. That June, Welch, Halsted, and Kelly sailed for Southampton and traveled by rail to London. There they reunited with Osler, who had left Hopkins in 1904 to become the Regis Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and all four made their way to Sargent’s studio near the Chelsea Embankment. Welch, Osler, Halsted, and Kelly posed in their academic robes and hoods. For days, they sat under a skylight in a stifling hot, poorly ventilated room redolent with the noxious fumes of oil paint, turpentine, and sweat. On some afternoons, all four were in the studio; on others, each came alone. By the time his subjects quit London and returned to their demanding careers, Sargent had succeeded in creating a divine gem of portraiture. On a canvas measuring 327.7 271.8 cm (10.75 9.08 feet), the four physicians are arranged around a book-strewn reading table and an antique Venetian globe. Osler, the great physician, appears as if about to leap to his feet to aid a patient in distress; Welch, the pathologist and medical statesman, sits supremely satisfied, his fingers resting on the leaves of an open tome; standing in Welch’s shadow with a dark, brooding pall cast over his face is the dour, cocaineand morphine-addicted surgeon, William Halsted. And if you look closely at Kelly, the gynecologist, he seems almost beatific or, at least, the most saintly of men. That is because the central devotion of Kelly’s life was his savior Jesus Christ. So tightly intertwined was the connection between Kelly’s daily endeavors and his Protestant Episcopalian beliefs that he often knelt in prayer before examining a patient or beginning an operation. Until, that is, many of his uncomfortable colleagues asked him to stop. Today, Kelly is best recalled for inventing several operating tools and devices, including the clamp that bears his name and that is still requested in operating rooms all over the world. In his day, however, he was widely regarded as a master of pelvic and genitourinary surgery. Many have credited Kelly with establishing gynecology as a bona fide specialty, and his superb descriptions of diseases of the urinary tract, appendix, abdomen, and female reproductive organs continue to inform physicians who take the time to go to the library stacks to pull down his richly illustrated textbooks. Kelly also found the time to author or edit several authoritative tomes on history, biography, botany, natural history, mushrooms, snakes, and even canoeing. On Osler’s recommendation, Welch called Kelly to help establish the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School in 1889. On relocating to Baltimore from the University of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Four Doctors, 1906. Oil on canvas. 327.7 271.8 cm. Courtesy of The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland.

‘The remembrance whereof is pleasant’: A Note on Walter Pope’s Role in the Attempt to Abolish Academic Dress during the Commonwealth

In Hargreaves-Mawdsley’s history of academic dress, there is a short paragraph on the attempt to abolish academic dress at Oxford during the Commonwealth in Britain. Hargreaves-Mawdsley noted that John Evelyn saw academic dress still in use in Oxford in 1654 but also indicated that, by 1658, there was a serious attempt by the Puritan authorities in the University to abolish academic robes. Hargreaves-Mawdsley mentioned that it was the proctor, Walter Pope, who averted the abolition. However he fails to give the account which lies behind the failed attempt at abolition. The purpose of this brief article is to recount Walter Pope’s own colourful narrative of the resistance to the attempt to abolish academic dress at Oxford. [Excerpt].

The History of the Dress Code at the University of Zagreb — From Jesuit Talers to Newly Designed Academic Gowns

At the foundation of the Academy (University) in 1669, every person who achieved an academic degree earned the right to wear academic dress and other insignia. However, the Jesuit professors preferred to wear the garments of their order. Academic dress was not developed afterwards because the Empress Maria Theresia did not approve of it. At a later date the deans wore a gold chain with a pendant medal. There was a tradition in which a beadle carried the university mace on ceremonial occasions. There were official students' garments at the university from 1895 to 1942. New ceremonial academic robes were designed in 1998 based on historical research.

The Origins of the University of Wales Robes

For those of us who regard the range of University of Wales shot silks as among the most beautiful and dignified of silks that adorn academic robes, the fact that details of their origins are unknown has been a source of irritation. The University of Wales Registry has often denied any knowledge of the origins of the University’s robes, and the University of Wales archives in the National Library of Wales contain no papers relating to the design of the robes. However, the recent development of the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspapers digital project, available through the Gale Group, has at last revealed something of the origins of the robes. [Excerpt].

Historical English Academic Robes: A Basis for a ‘National’ System

From time to time, various writers on the subject, Franklyn included, put out a call for a ‘national’ set of robes, which could be worn by any British graduate, whatever their degree and institution, as an alternative to the robes of their alma mater. Leaving aside any benefits it might have (one can see the attraction of it for graduates of the University of East Anglia and Kent …), the great problem would be: who would design it, and who would approve it? [The author's] thesis here is that the remains of such robes in fact still exist, and that it is possible to piece together the ‘national’ system fairly easily. [Excerpt].

A Long Way from Home

Many years ago, not long after I first started work in an academic library in Northern New South Wales, I had a conversation with a colleague about how exciting it would be to work in ‘an old, traditional university like Oxford’ in what seemed from a distance, a ‘real university’ as opposed to the smallish modern one I was currently employed in. This vague musing on a quiet afternoon during the stifling build up of a regular afternoon tropical storm was strangely prophetic. In between assisting individual students with their research into the relationship between aliens and the Internet (I'm not joking), I was dreaming about the musty old collections, academic robes, traditions and reading rooms which reeked of intellectual strain and rigour. Well, you know what they say about being careful what you wish for!

Towards a Standard Terminology for Describing Academic Dress

It has been clear for many years that a standard, clear, terminology for describing academic robes is needed. Universities and colleges use very imprecise terms, and different institutions will use the same term with different meanings. A standard terminology should enable a gown or hood to be drawn accurately from its description, exactly as an heraldic blazon enables a coat-of-arms to be drawn. [Excerpt].

The Doris Sym Memorial Lecture: Developing a Philosophy of Occupation for Health

The Third Caledonian Health Lecture, held on 3 March 1999, was dedicated to the memory of Doris Sym. MBE, Fellow of Glasgow Caledonian University, and founder and first Principal of the Glasgow School of Occupational Therapy. Professor Gordon Dickson, Dean of the Faculty of Health at Glasgow Caledonian University, hosted the event, which was attended by a wide range of people including Doris's family, friends, ex-colleagues, practising occupational therapists, retired occupational therapists and academics from other disciplines within the Faculty of Health. In 1997, the year of the diamond jubilee of occupational therapy education in Scotland. I had the honour of presenting Doris Sym for the award of honorary fellow of Glasgow Caledonian University. Resplendent in her academic robes, Doris gave a feisty speech recalling the challenges involved in setting up a new educational establishment and looking forward to her future participation in University events. Her death early in 1998 came as a shock to us all. The University was pleased and honoured to welcome Dr Ann Wilcock, founding editor of the Journal of Occupational Science: Australia and historian of the College of Occupational Therapists, to give her lecture — ‘Developing a philosophy of occupation for health’ — in memory of a pioneer and visionary woman who led the development of her profession and established the school teaching it in the West of Scotland. Ann Carnduff, Head. Division of Occupational Therapy, Glasgow Caledonian University.

STATE OF THE ART/SCIENCE IN ANTHROPOLOGY a

3 The symbolism of the quest for scientific status was marked: the archetypical image was not clad in academic robes but in a white lab coat, preferably with a slide rule (remember the slide rule?) sticking out of the pocket. Everyone wanted “laboratory” status. I worked at Harvard in both the Laboratory of Social Relations and the Laboratory of Human Development, and [begin page 328] even in France the burgeoning structuralists at the College de France instituted the Laboratoire de l’anthropologie sociale — still there and still flourishing under the same title. Both Britain and the United States then had a Social Science Research Council, and would have settled for nothing less. The vindictive Tory government in the United Kingdom has recently stripped the Science from its research council title — surely to avenge themselves on the pesky Fabians from the London School of Economics. Signs of the times indeed. We anthropologists understand these symbolic gestures, no? But back then it was science or bust. The terror of being excluded from scientific grace was palpable. The last thing a Ph.D. candidate wanted to hear was that he was being “unscientific.” Words of doom. 4 Just what constituted being scientific was in turn much debated. At Harvard it raged between the statistical crowd (analysis of variance qualified you for scientific heaven) and the Freudians. But even many of

Mathematics Education in Britain: An American Viewpoint

Before I embarked on my year of teaching in England under the auspices of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program, I had envisioned classes composed of English choirboys, colleagues teaching in academic gowns, and breaks in the day for morning coffee and afternoon tea. Although the tea break is still very much a part of the school day, “choirboy” students and academic robes are still to be found at only a very few schools. The reality was closer to Sidney Poi tier's experience in the movie To Sir with Love, with students challenging the teacher's authority at every possible opportunity. Nevertheless, I grew personally and developed professionally during my year of teaching abroad. My wife and I made new friends and explored a fascinating country. I was able to observe and become part of a foreign school system, and I tried to understand and analyze that system's approach to education. This article discusses some of the differences between the American and English systems and offers recommendations on the basis of my judgments about their relative merits.

THE RETURN OF VINCENT E. McKELVEY

At the director’s conference room in the Reston, Virginia, national headquarters of the United States Geological Survey, the 10 portraits of past directors stare blankly at visitors: six are Rembrandt‐like in their austerity, two are bedecked in bright academic robes, and one boasts a shiny newness. The other stands apart by its style. It is the portrait of the Survey’s ninth director. He is pictured in the field, in drab‐looking khaki, looking at you with eloquent simplicity. But in his appearance there is a feeling of having come out of a great ordeal, what Sherlock Holmes might have looked like when he emerged from the Reichenbach Falls. Who was this man?

On gurus and easy solutions

But I 'm here to say that, as women, we know that men can cooperate with us in making a dinner, doing the dishes, and talking to the children. It's a good life, this life of cooperation between equals, and we can have it not just a few of us in an educated elite, but all of us. When we move behind the evocation of science (the talk of paradigms and hypotheses), when we strip away the verbal foliage (the talk of flesh and rhythms), we find this sad message: that the loss of female culture is a loss only to women; that women have no place in the modern world; that equality with men is impossible for most of us; and that men have no place in the heartland of the home. Once this message is clearly perceived, I trust that it will get the reception it deserves as the most recent, and marginally "liberal ," face of the backlash. As for us, let's return to the struggle of winning equality and radically humanizing the w o r d we would be equal in. And as for Mr. Illich, perhaps he should exchange his academic robes for priestly ones and return to the medieval Roman Church from which his views on women so clearly descend.

The formal opening of the Tercentenary Celebrations by Her Majesty The Queen, Patron, at the Royal Albert Hall on 19 July 1960

If some of the founding Fellows could have witnessed the opening ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall they would have observed a scene of pageantry and colour which would have vied with the ceremonial of their own days. They would have listened to a story that would have surpassed their wildest hopes. Special floral arrangements by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, provided the framework for the large company to be assembled on the platform of the vast elliptical building. Occupying a central position at the rear of the platform were the musicians of the Royal Military School of Music and the banners of the trumpeters added another touch of colour to the brightly illuminated scene. By 2.45 p.m. the general company numbering some 4,000 were seated and soon the processions in their academic robes began to move to their allotted seats. The first procession entering from the rear of the Hall consisted of Fellows led by those elected in 1960. Never before had so many Fellows from all the various parts of the Commonwealth and elsewhere in the world been assembled in one place. They occupied the seats adjoining both sides of the platform as well as most of the platform itself where the senior Fellows took their places forming in all an arc of brilliant colour. The second procession was led by the Foreign Members of the Society followed by representatives of Universities and Academies of Sciences from 50 countries and the representatives of international scientific organizations, all of whom took their places in the arena seats facing the platform. The Society’s Mace preceded the third procession consisting of past Officers of the Society and the members of Council. The Charter Book, a gift from the founder King Charles II, was carried in the rear of this procession and placed in position on a table on the platform. The removal of the Society’s Mace was the signal that the Royal Party had arrived. The Royal procession, Her Majesty The Queen and His Royal Highness The Prince Philip with Their Majesties the King and Queen of Sweden, accompanied by the President, then took their seats on the platform. MESSAGGIO DELL’UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA Di Professor D. Graffi TRANSLATION OF THE MESSAGE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA By Professor D. Graffi MESSAGE DE CONGRATULATION DE L’ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES DE L’INSTITUT DE FRANCE De M. Jean Lecomte MESSAGE OF CONGRATULATION FROM THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE By M. Jean Lecomte MESSAGE OF CONGRATULATION FROM THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE By Sir John Eccles, F.R.S.