Hogwarts Revisited

A former student of mine contacted me some time ago to say her parents would be coming out from Kenya for her summer graduation, and inviting me to meet them.  So it was that on Friday I hied myself to the last of Concrete University’s December graduation ceremonies.  As I understand it, these were instituted some years ago so that international students could get capped before returning home or heading on to whatever is next.

I’ve been to many graduations, including my own and those of friends, but mostly as a member of staff.  The programmes in which I teach have their own conferment ceremony, at which staff turn out in academic dress and the dignitaries are bedeled in with the ceremonial mace, so with at least two of these a year that’s probably about twenty internal and university-wide graduations in the last twelve or so years.  For the larger ceremony, I prefer to go incognito and sit in the audience.  Academic dress is very heavy and the lights on stage hot.*

I was struck, secreted at the back of the auditorium, how heavily the ceremony as a whole draws on liturgical forms.  The whole experience is very much High Anglican, which for me is no bother, given my upbringing and first employment, but which might seem rather strange and arcane to those unversed in such tradition–and why should anyone be?  In conferring degrees, or at least conferring them in the manner in which it does, the university invokes a kind of platonic authority.  The moment at which the student receives their degree and caps themselves is not unlike the supposedly transformative moment of Confirmation.  The recipient’s state changes, magically, from graduand to graduate just as the communicant is received into the church by the laying on of hands.

It is indicative, I suppose, that I haven’t attended very many sports matches in the extent to which I feel uncomfortable singing the national anthem in English, but at the same time indicative of the bicultural norms by which we roll at the university that I could quite happily sing the same in Maori without blanching under the interventionist-God-ishness of it all.  Similarly, all those hours spent in church meant that I stayed until the end of the exit Toccata, because one does not walk out on the organist, after all.

The auditorium was hung with flags of all the home countries of the graduands in the kind of charming internationalism on whose behalf I would make class speeches as a teenager.  I thought of the socialists and neo-conservatives known to me alike, the ones for whom that kind of liberal internationalism is somewhere between empty and useless, and wondered too at how so many people I know hold politically polarised positions.  Everywhere I looked there was a symbol and behind it a question.  This, of course, is why so many people despise what post-modernism has done to our thinking.  The querying it gives rise to never lets up.

My place within the university is, however, partisan enough for me to approve thoroughly of a new addition to the ceremony: the karanga that brought in the PhD graduands separately from the rest of the throng.  Engineers mostly, this cohort looked pleased but bashful.  My impression is that Arts PhDs tend more to the fist-pumping and air-punching variety, possibly gazing back over the wreck of our former lives that we wrought with this damn project now completed.  That’s not to say, of course, that these graduands weren’t feeling the same, just that they didn’t show it.

Around the time I graduated with my PhD it was still socially acceptable for audience members and even academics on stage to laugh at the proliferation of Chinese names read out.  It used to fill me with shame to hear people giggling as the many students named Li all took their degrees, and with embarrassment as those charged with reading out the names spoke as if with stones in their mouth, turning Hui into Hoo-eey and Guo into Goo-oh.  This now seems to have stopped.  Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian and Arab students were capped without a snicker from anywhere.  One Dean reading names simply went syllable by syllable, for local and international students alike.  It worked very well.  I’m well pleased at the change.

Not only was my former student graduating–looking beautiful in Indian dress with her hair long–but one of her former classmates also took her degree, and a further student who was in the very first intake of Foundation Studies, which had begun by the time I joined the programme, took a masters.  When she came to university her family had just arrived from Afghanistan, not leaving much behind.  These kind of successes make me glad to be among all the pomp and ceremony.  They are, more or less, the reason why I do my job.

*At least one of my colleagues can’t abide graduation ceremonies at all and bemoans their feudalism.  When one is berobed and the temperature raised about five degrees thereby, it’s hard to disagree.  At least capitalist modernity has lighter fabrics.