A degree of error

This article was published in Trinity News on 17 November, 2009, the fifteenth 'Old Trinity' column.

A degree of error

(Right: The incorrect BA hood which is currently in use.)

THE FATE of most Trinity students is to graduate with the Baccalaureus in Artibus degree. Whether you take a first-class Moderatorship or get a third at the end of the Junior Sophister year, the BA hood – black, lined with white fur – is prescribed for you on Commencements day.

Draping a furry garment down one’s back is an old university tradition, not limited to Dublin. Those graduating with a BA at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham also wear a black hood with white fur, and BAs of the defunct Royal University of Ireland wore the same combination. We share the white fur with these other universities, but the hood of each institution has a unique shape.

All Dublin University degrees have a hood of the same shape, the Dublin full shape; their

differences are in the colours of the hood itself and its lining and edging. The BA, as mentioned, is black, lined with white fur. Some of the other hoods you might spot in Parliament Square include the include the bachelor in dental science (BDentSc: myrtle green, lined with black, edged in crimson), the master of arts (MA: black, lined with blue) and the doctor in letters (LittD: crimson, lined and edged blue). A full list is given in the Calendar on page E9.

(Two girls wearing the BDentSc hood after taking their degrees in 2007.)

Many will be indifferent, but others will be displeased: BA graduands are not currently supplied with the correct hood at Commencements. When the BA hood which is currently available for rental is compared with the hoods supplied for every other degree one can see a noticeable difference. This BA hood consists only of a fur-lined cowl, and lacks the distinctive square cape of the Dublin hood, which you can see in the illustrations on this page.

(The Dublin University BA, MA and LittD hoods. These drawings, from Haycraft’s 1948 Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Universities and Colleges, clearly show the square cape which the current BA hood is lacking.)

One could assume that this hood is correct, and that our BA hood is special not only in its use of white fur but also in its shape. A consultation of authoritative reference books does not bear out such an assumption. Shaw includes a drawing of the Dublin hood, and mentions no difference in the shape of the BA hood, and a depiction of the BA hood itself can be seen in Haycraft, with the fur-lined cape clearly visible.

Armstrong & Oxford, the company which supplies academic dress to the university, sent me a polite letter in response to an enquiry on this subject. “We would imagine,” I was informed, “that at some point in the past, somebody within the university decided to alter the design slightly for reasons that they must have felt were justified at the time.” This occurred, said the letter writer, before Armstrong & Oxford became Trinity’s official robemaker.

There is possible but unlikely explanation for what is almost certainly a blunder. Trinity had another hood shape until at least 1909. This simple shape hood can be seen in a set of Wills’s cigarette cards (these were reproduced in Trinity News in February this year) and in Haycraft’s Degrees and Hoods book. The same shape is also still used for Queen’s Belfast hoods. If someone did try to return the Trinity BA hood to this shape (it’s not very likely) then he got it wrong: the fur lining is different on the old simple shape hood.

I find the following the mostly likely explanation: a batch of BA hoods was ordered at some time in the past. The producer, to save on materials (perhaps there was a lack of fake fur) or due to ignorance or carelessness, came up with this new BA hood. The batch was delivered, no one noticed or cared, and subsequent Trinity BA hoods were made to this new pattern.

One could claim that this new hood is the de facto BA hood, pointing out that many Trinity men have taken their first degree wearing it. This, however, is not enough to justify maintaining a break in a long tradition.

Thousands of Dublin University graduates have indeed taken their BAs wearing the incorrect academic dress – and they continue to do so. There is no reason for the hood to be in this strange shape. It would be laudable if the supplier would begin to reintroduce BA hoods of the correct shape. Until that happens the only solution for the fastidious candidate bachelor is to have a BA hood of the correct shape specially made.

EDWARD Gaffney, a 2008 graduate, took his degree wearing this strange hood. He wrote to me on an unrelated matter, to point out that the word jib, an old Trinity word referring, slightly pejoratively, to Junior Freshman students, survives elsewhere. The members of the NUI Galway Literary and Debating Society call their neophytes gibs. This variant spelling occurs in the 1791 Advice to the University of Dublin and in verses in the 19th-century Trinity periodical Kottabos: A College Miscellany.

Perhaps the Galwegians’ use of gib dates back all the way to the founding of the “Lit & Deb” in 1846. It became a society of Queen’s College, Galway, a few years later.

Another Kottabos poem mentions both jibs and the Queen’s University of Ireland, of which the Galway institution was a constituent college. A failing Trinity student is considering going up to one of the so-called “godless colleges”: “So my heart leaps up within me, beating strong against my ribs/To be in some sort of college, in among the throng of jibs.”

But he gives up the idea, not esteeming the Queen’s colleges highly enough: “Fool! again the dream, the fancy, what I’ve said is all a fib/For I count the Queen’s Professor lower than the Dublin jib.”

Apologies, Galway, for this ancient insult! And congratulations to the Lit & Deb for holding fast to tradition.