big blue, part 1

The organist played, the chaplain spoke...

 

The vice-chancellor bopped us graduands on the head with what tradition says are John Knox's knickers. In reality, it is a piece of fabric from some late seventeenth-century doctor's birretum [fancy hat], which has been conferring degrees for over 300 years.

 

I walked across a stage dressed in blue and holding my hood...

 

When the Dean of the Faculty of the Arts and Divinity had finished naming my degree and reading the title of my thesis (which is half Greek and which he did quite masterfully--with practice, I was told), he called me across the stage. A man then took my hood... (notice the people to the right of the stage, how much they are clapping for me. I don't even know them)...

 

I knelt, and the vice-chancellor then spoke Latin over me: et super te, meaning 'and upon you'. It is the shortened version of (in Latin): 'I promote you to the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, as a symbol of which I place this cap upon you'. The moment that the cap touches the head is the point at which the degree is officially conferred. So I got bopped on the head with a 300+ year old hat and officially became Dr. Haley Goranson. Then the official Mace-Man hooded me, and I left the stage as a changed person (if only in title. It's a shame that I don't care more about titles. As it is, my students will still call me Haley, which I will always prefer, I think).

 

After some speeches and a couple of songs from the choir, the mace-men removed the maces...

and the stage was eventually cleared...

 

 

at which point we all processed out into St. Salvator's Quad (of which, see anon).