If you’ve ever been at a Dutch PhD ceremony, you’ve come across the toga – which is, unfortunately not a Greek or Roman toga as pictured here. Instead, it’s a kind of black gown, made from heavy cloth, with velvet facings, accompanied by a white collar and a velvet hat that resembles the mortarboards that students around the world wear (and throw) at graduation. This outfit is worn not only at doctoral defenses, but also at inaugural lectures or the official opening of the academic year (here you get an impression of what this looks like in Groningen). Other countries and universities have their own versions of academic regalia, probably with Oxford and Cambridge leading the crowd.
As a foreigner (“international”, as they say in the Netherlands), I got introduced to this custom for the first time when being on a doctoral committee while still working outside the country. When asked whether I wanted to borrow a toga, I was baffled, and found some kind of excuse (probably that I wasn’t a full professor yet). I had an instinctive defensive reaction, which, at the time, I couldn’t quite make sense of. What had spontaneously come to my mind was a slogan of the German 1968 student movement that is hard to forget if you’ve heard it once: “Unter den Talaren, Muff von 1000 Jahren”, “Under the gowns, fug of 1000 years” (see e.g. here for a nice picture and historical account, in German). Although this has often been read as directed against a generation of professors many of whom had a Nazi past (the “1000 year Reich”), it was in fact directed mostly against academic hierarchies and the exclusion of students from university governance. And these latter points – especially the rejection of German university hierarchies, with permanent jobs only for professors – I wholeheartedly share.
Over the years, and with moving to the Netherlands, I had to wear togas many times. I would borrow it from the university where the ceremony takes place, and I always need to ask for the smallest one they have. I guess that’s because the universities have inherited these leentoga’s from emeriti, or had bought them for their historically male professoriat. And Dutch males are, on average, at least one head taller than me. Every time, I’m worried that I will trip over a toga that is too long, roll down the red-carpeted stairs, break my neck and thereby ruin the celebration for the poor doctoral student.
But why, then, toga’s? I’ve heard different explanations from Dutch colleagues. Some see it simply as a beautiful tradition, and if they are into traditions, they like it for that reason. But I also received more substantive accounts.
One is that the toga’s are meant to represent professors in their professional role. All non-relevant features (e.g. conflicting interests, political opinions, etc.) are meant to disappear. In that sense, they are like the robe of a judge, signaling that when wearing it, one is dedicated to nothing but the principles of scholarship, which, in a PhD ceremony, are taken over by the new doctor.
I get this. I can also see a certain beauty in it, even though I’m myself not one deeply into rituals. When I’m at PhD defenses at universities without any kind of ritual, it sometimes feels as if this important moment passes too quickly and prosaically, without being marked out as special.
But then again, why should we be bound by professional obligations only on these select occasions? Shouldn’t we follow the same ideals in our daily work, in teaching and research and when we speak in public, as well? Shouldn’t we then, rather, wear something like the Engineer’s Ring that keeps our professional responsibility in our minds, day in, day out? (When googling for this blogpost, I learned that the story that the first Engineer’s Ring was made from the ore of a collapsed bridge, to remind engineers to never let such a thing happen, seems to be an urban myth – it’s ben trovato nonetheless).
A second reading of the toga’s is that there is something egalitarian in them, in the sense, that everyone wears them at a defense and they present the academic community as a whole. “I’m always happy when I see a woman in a toga,” an elderly female academic once said to me. For her, the right to wear the toga stood for inclusion in the academic community.
That argument also doesn’t quite work, in my view. Traditionally, only those who are “hoogleraren” (full professors) were allowed to wear a toga. If you were an assistant or associate professor, you were not allowed to do so, even in cases in which you had done most of the work, e.g. as main supervisor of a PhD student, or the same amount of work as others, as members of the PhD committee. There are ongoing discussions about this rule at Dutch universities. I’m a member of De Jonge Academie, and stand behind their call that *if* you want to wear toga’s, give that right to everyone who was involved in the process. That holds, in particular, in the case of academics who cannot be promoted to full professor not for lack of experience and achievements, but simply for lack of money on behalf of their university. There is something brutally exclusionary in seeing a committee with most people in toga’s, and then one or two colleagues without them. And it would also be much more beautiful for the pictures to let everyone wear one!
A third dimension of the toga become clear to me on an autumn day when I hadn’t realized how miserable my cold was until I was at a ceremony, under a toga (they’re terribly warm – but when you have a cold, that’s quite comfy). In a way, I realized, it didn’t matter – because the toga makes everything personal and individual disappear under its black cloth. As long as you manage to keep all body fluids together so that nothing stains the toga, it doesn’t matter what you wear under it,* what you look like, what your body posture is like. Your body becomes a cloak hanger for the toga, basically.
And that, I realized, was also something that I felt uncomfortable with. It was almost as if the toga suggested a Cartesian dualism between body and mind, the physical and the spiritual, with the body not mattering any more. I need not rehearse all the problems of this dualist picture, but there is even more. Our bodies are part of why we differ and have different perspectives. They root us in a physical reality, in space and time, and in different cultural traditions. And in research, diversity matters: through diverse perspective, we get to new ideas, we test each other’s claim and subject them to scrutiny. Feminist philosophers of science, e.g. Helen Longino, have written extensively about this need for pluralism, and I am a strong believer in their arguments. The toga’s create sameness among the professoriat, instead of celebrating diversity, along so many lines, as a key ingredient of good academic practice.
What, then, should academics wear – what would we opt for if we could start from scratch? It would be fun to go for the Greek and Roman togas, for once, but let’s keep that for motto parties. Insofar as there is something valuable in some kind of regalia for certain moments, it should be something that everyone who contributed to the scholarly endeavor should be allowed to wear on the day of celebration (maybe, for doctoral defenses, we should also grant this right to the many people in university administrations who are key for supporting doctoral students?). Personally, I would feel much more comfortable if it was a kind of garment that would not let our bodies disappear under black velvet, but instead showed that academics are humans like others, with bodies that are as frail and diverse of those of everyone else. If we need something that serves as a reminder that we are here to speak without attention to personal interests or other non-academic concerns, maybe we could do with some kind of hat or collar piece.
Not that I think this issue is important enough to start a revolt. It’s a well-established tradition to have regalia, in many universities, and they have even been reintroduced in some, at least for graduation day.** What we should keep revolting for, though, is fairness – if some get to wear it for a certain reason (not title!), all those to whom this reason applies should be allowed to do so. That bit of logical consistency should certainly be mandatory for everyone who wears it.
* Not quite – according to the rules, serious clothing and black shoes are mandatory.
** The cynical reading of this, however, is that this is an attempt to emotionally tie graduates to the university, so that, as alumni, they will respond better to calls for donations…
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