Teachers In Regalia
I have been uneasy with the idea of academic regalia ever since high school graduation. Could there be a stupider hat than a mortarboard? Until this year my resistance was limited to a refusal to buy an academic outfit. I wore the cap, gown and hood of a University of Chicago PhD whenever I was required to march in regalia. A friend who had inherited it and who had no use for it gave it to me. I did not go to the University of Chicago, but the tam is similar to Brown's. A tam is preferable to a mortarboard. At least it looks like a hat.
Over the years a nagging sense that wearing this outfit is morally as well as intellectually wrong has waxed and waned. This year it has waxed to the point that I find myself angry at the thought and unwilling to play the game.
I can best express the catalyst for my outrage with a series of images. The first is a picture of the grand poobahs of six flavors of lunacy favored in Jerusalem. The occasion of their get-together? To join forces in preventing self-identified homosexuals from marching in the streets of Jerusalem. The NY Times reports the meeting as if it were a board meeting of a charitable foundation. No one mentions the taste in clothes. Everyone is glad, I guess, that six people in the Middle East can finally agree on something.
The image I wanted next was one that ran only a few days later during the seemingly endless necrophilic popewatch frenzy. In it the pope lies dead but ornately robed while an even more outlandishly arrayed cardinal sprinkles water on the corpse from a golden vessel. A figure in the colorful garb of a 16th Century Swiss pikeman stands in the background. Again the reporting is portentous. Not a hint of the incongruity of this scene in the 21st Century. Or the bizarreness of a purported follower of Jesus "If you have two cloaks" Christ dressing like King Tut meets Liberace. I couldn't find that image. This one will have to do.
Juxtapose with these the image of a typical academic procession at an American college or university. Getting uncomfortable?
Now add to the mix a recent news photo of the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia holding hands with Prince Abdullah. The occasion here, it so happens, was a meeting of minds to explain to the women of that glorious kingdom why it is they cannot vote, hold office, or be seen in public without a veil.
It reminds me of a famous picture of this Grand Mufti's predecessor. In it he is clubbing with some other fellows who knew the power of a good suit.
I have had it with funny suits. I am selling mine on E-Bay and giving the money to the American Friends Service Committee. College teachers everywhere should do the same. Our ideals are rationality and justice. Our tools are dialogue, inquiry, logic and experiment. We teach the careful apportioning of degrees of belief to degrees of evidence. We accept an argument because it is sound, not because it comes from someone in particular. The semiosphere is saturated with images of unbalanced MEN in crazy costumes whose ideals are irrational and unjust, whose tools are fiat and censorship, and who teach belief in the absurd. These are the media stars of the present. In wearing regalia borrowed from medieval monks we associate ourselves in the public mind with the contradictory of everything we believe in. Our carnivals are not innocent. Hate and patricarchy own the clown suit now.
Appendix A
Appendix B
Bizarro speaks truth to the powerless.
