You Can Keep Your Hat On
Nice to see my old university, Anglia Ruskin, is back in the news today.Following allegations that the administration at the university may not be the best, nice to see that the university's administrators have apparently banned students from throwing their mortar board hats up into the air at graduation ceremonies.
They know how to attract good press, don't they?
Anyway the whole situation made me laugh - not just the crazy ruling in the first place, but also the massive over-reaction from the student reps and the national press.
In my 3 years at Anglia, I never once saw a student throwing a mortar board in the air. Perhaps this is because no-one in the mid-90s had much to celebrate after a decade and a half of Tory rule (combined with spending 3 years at Anglia), but I wonder if the ban had not been suggested how many people would have actually thrown their hats anyway?
Also a nice piece of detail about the concerns of the university comes out in the official response:
"Someone could be blinded by a falling hat or even worse. The possible damage to hats also has to be considered. Our suppliers support our position."
Yes let's not damage (or risk offending) the hats - after all, they have feelings too.
Anglia is possibly the one uni I could ever imagine being as equally worried about the safety of a hat as it is its students. :-/
But you may note from that comment that very few students at Anglia buy their graduation robes and mortar boards. I presume that this is because when we open our wardrobes we probably don't particularly want reminding that our academic brilliance was limited to 3 years at a Poly somewhere in East Anglia. And it's not the sort of thing we are likely to bring up at a dinner party, unless we are feeling particularly self-effacing or ironic about our intellectual abilities.
But having said that, I loved my 3 years at Anglia. I loved the students, loved the staff and, well, I take my hat off to them. ;-)
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(Photo Source: Navy NewsStand, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:AnnapolisGraduation.jpg)
Labels: Anglia Ruskin, hats, health and safety, mortar board
posted by Kerron @ 2:37 PM
3 Comments:
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There is a very serious point about the hiring. Very few people these days at any university buy their graduation robes - after all when else are they likely to be wearing them? (And some of us wouldn't want to be seen dead in them - I cannot think of one academic dress scholar who has anything good to say about the Kent hood.) So consequently everyone is hiring for the day. And if it's like my two graduations at Kent (which uses the same robe hire company) then it's not really practical to check every single mortarboard, gown and hood as they are returned, so damage is very hard to trace. Thus discouraging potentially damaging practices at source seems eminently sensible to me so I can understand the suppliers at least agreeing this, although it's not the angle they've gone with.
As for the health & safety issues, sadly we seem to be becoming ever more like the US - and most graduation ceremonies are likely to have people with law degrees at them. The practice itself seems to be a US import as well, hence many people not being able to recall mass throwing at their ceremonies.
Dear Kerron,
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Jenny Galea
The Caretaker for
Labourinlabour.wordpress.com
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