Feature Article

Academic Regalia at Oberlin: the Establishment and Dissolution of a Tradition¹

S.E. Plank, Ph.D., FBS
Oberlin College

[I]f any season is worthy of symbolical expression and emphasis, it is the Commencement season, the initiation of new members into the international fraternity of educated men. . . . Viewed in this light all the formalism of college life assumes significance; it becomes an awe-full thing to wear a cap and gown.

The Oberlin Review (June 21, 1906)

Styles of clothing carry feelings and trusts, investments, faiths and formalized fears. Styles exert a social force, they enroll us in armies--moral armies, political armies, gendered armies, social armies.

John Harvey, Men in Black (1995)

Introduction

With the adoption of the Intercollegiate Code in 1895, American universities and colleges embraced a uniformity of design in academic costume that has held sway until the relatively recent proliferation of university-specific gowns.² Accordingly, studies of American academic costume may find questions of usage a richer inquiry than questions of design and development, questions of social history more compelling than a study of regalia as autonomous objects unto themselves. A particularly interesting example is the usage and social history of regalia at Oberlin College (Ohio), a usage established around the beginning of the twentieth century as the college experienced a burgeoning interest in "collegiateness," and a usage dramatically altered in the late twentieth century with the politicizing of the campus and its ceremonial events.

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