Scott Green

I worked my butt off all three years of law school, so naturally I had to dress like a mental patient to graduate.

Silly clothing is a long-standing tradition of higher education. Two weeks ago my classmates and I crossed the stage in blue robes with dark blue arm patches, blue mortarboards, and a purple hood with blue and orange stripes. The outfit symbolized that I had earned my Juris Doctor at a top-25 law school and therefore had dignity.

In academia, the more honors you accumulate the dumber you have to look at graduation. Students get caps and gowns; professors on stage get black robes with golden cords and some even wear black puffy caps. Once President Obama starts racking up honorary degrees, he’ll have to give commencement speeches dressed like Flavor Flav.

At least there were nearly 200 of us at the law school’s ceremony; it’s got to be worse for graduates of small departments earning doctorates in areas nobody cares about, like Theoretical Hypernuclear Turbonomics or English. Some even graduate alone and are forced to sit through a whole hour-long ceremony in an auditorium in which they are the only person dressed like a goober. This is probably what happened to the Unabomber.

And graduates don’t just wear these outfits – they have to pay for them. My cap, gown and hood cost more than $70 to rent for 90 minutes of use. This is quite a racket for Herff Jones, a company that does most of its business a few weekends a year during graduation season. The rest of the year its employees are free to imagine even more ridiculous things for graduates to wear.

“Hey! What if we glue live mackerels to the sleeves?” is the sort of innovative thought for which Herff Jones employees receive large bonuses.

The problem is the lack of any connection between commencement attire and academic achievement. If graduation outfits were supposed to reflect what students did the past few years, they’d include gym shorts and bar crawl tees.

That’s why I think caps and gowns are a big scam. But it’s one that’ll never change, because colleges probably get kickbacks on every rental. I don’t know the University of Illinois’s take, but thousands graduate every year, and restrooms in the Henry Administration Building all have two-ply toilet paper, if you get my drift.

Nothing’s stopping colleges from getting more money, either. If General Motors offered a big enough cut, next year’s graduates would have to buy Chevy Malibus covered in stripes and mackerels. What else could students do, stay in college an extra year? The car is cheaper.

So I propose future graduates be allowed to collect our sheepskins in whatever clothes we want. If Herff Jones insists someone dress like an idiot, I recommend the audience. They didn’t get up for 8 a.m. classes on tort theory or memorize the Federal Rules of Evidence. Let them suffer a little.