Over centuries, conferment ceremonies have evolved towards Arnold van Gennep’s classic anthropological three-staged rite-of-passage model, further elaborated by Victor Turner, where liminality, an intermediate stage ”betwixt and between”, predominates. Simultaneously rituals, which in themselves comprise numerous smaller rituals and ceremonies, have many other ritualistic elements that build a sense of community in conferment ceremonies.
As a three-day celebration, the conferment ceremony exhibits the classic three-staged anthropological model based on which Joseph Campbell formulated his own narrative model of the hero's journey. Likewise, on a symbolic level, each conferment ceremony is a journey of its own, which begins in the ordinary world and returns to it, but between the departure and the return one lives in the differentiated ‘time and place of the conferment ceremony’, where for a fleeting moment the multilayered past and many myths exist simultaneously.
In classical terms, the conferment ceremony is a time and place of its own – created ritually, symbolically and practically – and separated from the everyday world. For one ‘night’ between Thursday and Sunday, conferment ceremony participants and organisers are outside mundane society in their own bubble, in time outside time, where clocks tick in sync to a different rhythm and conferment time prevails.
Many participants have compared the conferment ceremony to a journey or a live-action role-playing game, where you travel in time for a few days and live within a narrative of the deep past, one which is only familiar from historical dramas or period series and films. One participant in the 2022 conferment ceremony said that they were strongly reminded of the Downton Abbey television series.
With its departure from reality, the conferment ceremony includes many game-like dynamics that bring people together and help to construct a shared reality.
Like rituals and ceremonies, the conferment ceremony builds and creates a community among those participating in it also including the spectators. The significance of the conferment ceremony in creating the identity and sense of community of the more informal academic community around the university as a legal and administrative body has grown with the waning of other similar festivities, the growth of student numbers and the diversification of communication channels. The conferment ceremony has become a significant force in bringing people together.
Originally in the Middle Ages, conferment ceremonies in Bologna and Paris were simpler one-day affairs. The graduand toured the city with musicians to inform their sponsors, friends and compatriots of their conferment ceremony. The ceremony itself usually took place at a local cathedral, where a deacon or bishop served as the chancellor overseeing the university in their role as a representative of the Pope. In the presence of the chancellor or their representative, the conferrer presented the graduand to the masters convened. The graduand then had to defend their thesis and answer questions put forward by the masters to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. After this public examination, examen rigorosus, the most senior of the masters present announced that the graduand was accepted to join their rank. As an emblem of their new title and status, the new master received a ring, a pair of gloves, a hat and a book after which the conferrer sat them down on the lectern and kissed them in presenting both sides of their face to the other, as a sign of peace. At the conclusion of these rituals belonging to the old era of guilds, the chancellor or his representative also blessed the new master and presented them with a diploma which gave them a permission to teach.
Originally limited to the area of the university town, the teaching permit, licentia docendi, expanded in the 13th century by powers delegated to the chancellors by the Pope to teaching permits valid in the whole of Christendom, licentia docendi ubique. The origins of teaching permits and degrees are situated in the Islamic world of the 11th century, where individual masters in madrasas granted certificates and letters of recommendation called ijazah to their students who had successfully completed their studies. Unlike European degree certificates, each master granted their own certificates and the right to issue such letters was in no way linked to the madrasa or any other institution. The ceremonial conferral of degrees was usually followed by a church service in a cathedral after which the graduand rode on horseback through the city in a procession. In the evening, the graduand would offer a dinner to their friends, compatriots and all the old masters.
From the simpler model of the inception of Bologna and the convectus in Paris, the conferment ceremonies started to develop into celebrations lasting several days already during the medieval period with a range of traditions that began to evolve in different universities. In Castilian Salamanca the graduand was to organise a bullfight culminating in the graduand delivering the coup de grâce to the bull, which then was served at the conferment dinner. In Vienna, Austria, the graduand was given a ceremonial bath in a spa prior to the ceremonial conferral of degrees. In addition to the master’s insignia, doctoral graduands received golden spurs received golden spurs as a sign of their status as knights of the spirit parallel to that of the nobility.
In the 15th century Germany, graduands with limited means might arrange a conferment ceremony together to save on costs. This tradition paved the way towards collective conferment ceremonies, similar to the Finnish conferment ceremony of today. The models of the universities of Prague and Tübingen spread North via Leipzig and Rostock with the University of Wittenberg in Saxony serving as an important post-Reformation pioneer.
The first stage of Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite classification of rites of passage is the separation from the rest of the community or society in order to form a ritual community. In Campbell’s monomyth model this represents the beginning of the hero's journey and his exit from the familiar sphere of everyday life to the wild and the unknown. The everyday sphere of life with its familiar rules and customs is left behind and one enters the sphere of ritual and mythical time. In ritual time and space, other rules change and are replaced by new ones while power relations are reorganised. To borrow terminology from Huizinga and Caillois, a magic circle of play is created where the internal rules of play replace those of ordinary life and society. For example, a 60-year-old master’s graduand, who in their everyday life may be the supervisor of the 20-year-old marshal, is guided by the marshal, and when needed, must follow their orders.
In the ritual space, conferment ceremony participants are given new roles and the role strongly defines what they should or even must do to fulfil that role. Indeed, the conferment ceremony has been aptly compared both to a play and a live action role-playing game. The first stage of the conferment ceremony comprises preparatory meetings, such as the Flora’s day celebration with its selection of the official wreath-weaver, the workshops for preparing wire frames for the wreaths, the preliminary wreath-weaving session as well as information sessions for graduands.
However, the actual start is on the Thursday of the conferment week, when companions of the master’s graduands, i.e., wreath-weavers, gather together to weave, in practice sew, the laurel wreaths required for the master’s graduands in the ceremonial conferral of degrees while the graduands are rehearsing the conferment of degrees in the Great Hall. Clothes serve as a sign of delineation and onset of ritual time and space, since Thursday is the first day when formal dress is required. The first stage of the transition rite involves detaching oneself from ordinary life and moving into an imaginary or metaphysical sphere dominated by rite. At the same time, master's and doctoral graduands form their own groups, members of which get to know each other.
The rituals preparing for the culmination of the next day serve to prepare and form a rite community. Once the master’s graduands’ laurel wreaths are completed, a piece of jewellery is presented during dinner to the official wreath-weaver, who has supervised the weaving of the wreaths in their role as a symbol of the spring and youth. Elsewhere, doctoral swords are being sharpened on a grindstone dampened with sparkling wine during the ceremonial sword-whetting, with the purpose of sharpening wits to be used as doctoral weapons in defending knowledge and truth after the ceremonial conferral of degrees.
The second stage of the ceremony and the core of the ritual, or the culmination, comprises the ceremonial conferral of degrees on Friday. This ceremony is the locus of the core ritual, granting of the right to the new masters and doctors thus to use the insignia of their degrees and symbolically accepting them as members of the academic community. Since 1862 the degree and professional qualifications have been separated from the conferment ceremony, which originally bestowed the graduates with the title of Master or Doctor of Philosophy. Subsequent to the Bologna Process, the conferment process only grants the graduands the right to use insignia related to their degree; master’s graduands a laurel wreath and ring, doctoral graduands a hat and a sword. At the same time, they will be linked to the continuum of scholars, ideologically originating with the mythical birth of universities in 12th century Bologna.
Alongside their insignia, the masters and doctors become qualified, when needed, to confer future masters and doctors, following the model established by the church and related to the transferral of spiritual gifts and the force of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon the Apostoles by Jesus Christ on to priests and bishops, who then are endowed through their ordination with the ability to bring new members to this chain and continuum. This aspect emphasises the nature of the conferment ceremony as a rite of a multi-member and transgenerational community, where the community renews itself and continues by ordaining new members, consequently forging the next link in the chain of conferment ceremonies.
In the context of Campbell’s hero’s journey, the ceremonial conferral of degrees takes place at the catharsis, culmination or facing the beast. In van Gennep’s rite of passage, the ceremonial conferral of degrees itself is the transition between two social roles, from a child to an adult and from a pupil to a teacher, which takes place at an intermediate state of liminality. In rituals, liminality is a powerful and potentially dangerous crossroads, where one has left behind the ordinary world and roles, moving on to a new world and a role. Old rules dissipate to make room for new ones. The old identities die symbolically and new identities are born in rituals for their bearers.
Uniform dress code, devoid of personality, emphasises graduands as a mass, lacking in personality as their past identity as students is left behind and they will be reborn in their new academic role as masters, doctors, honorary doctors, jubilee masters or jubilee doctors. In liminality, the past and future are in a state of uncertainty until the ritual, when completed from start to finish, brings the participants back on the path and the past and future are reunited into a single continuum.
In the minds of the participants, the ceremonial conferral of degrees represents actual suffering with its strict dress code, prolonged standing up and sitting down. Apparently, on some subconscious level, people still believe that nothing comes for free and that suffering, paying a symbolic prize for what you are about to receive, makes it all the more worthwhile. As a strong antithesis of a modern rite, the conferral itself dissolves the individuality and personality of the participants with a uniform dress code and anonymity; the conferrer does not read out the names of the graduands unlike in a school spring celebration. A classical symbolic death, loss of the selfhood, takes place in the ceremonial conferral of degrees. The old identity must give way to the new to step in, and this takes place through a ritual death and rebirth. With its black and white attires, the colour scheme of the ceremonial conferral further emphasises this. The aspect of rebirth is also strongly highlighted, as after having been conferred their degrees, the master’s graduands exit into the bright lobby through the main doors. Even though the ceremonial conferral of degrees itself does not include earth-shattering experiences, the expectations and rehearsals, as well as the music played throughout the conferral, highlight the ceremony itself.
The third day of the conferment ceremony starts with the morning excursion and lunch, but culminate in the evening ball, which has a liberating effect at the end of formal celebrations. In van Gennep’s and Turner’s models this is the return from liminality to the ordinary world and the rest of society. In Campbell’s hero’s journey this is the hero’s return from a foreign place outside the everyday sphere of experiences with new knowledge, skills and powers, usually to save or improve their own everyday sphere of life. The initiates return to society in their new role, which the academic community has bestowed upon them in the ritual.
After the strict and rigid conferral as well as the beginning of the ball dominated by formality and tact, catharsis occurs once the conferrer has departed through an honour guard of swords held aloft by doctors. The head marshal shouts that Barabbas is on the loose, which is a sign that the duties of the marshals are over and they then throw their sashes at the head marshal. At the same time, the exit of the marshals heralds the start of a more informal celebration.
As a pastor participating in the ball has said, the human mind needs carnivalistic liberation and relaxation after the ritualistic part of the ceremony dominated by strict formalism. Barabbas is a reference to the New Testament and its depiction of the events of Passover. Barabbas is the thief that the crowd prefers to be released instead of Jesus and yell Barabbas’ name to Pontius Pilate. In other words, the Christian time chained by rules and formalities gives way to the wilder ‘pagan’ time.
The conga-style dance maccaroni at the conclusion of the ball represents the great liberation and carnivalistic subversion of the high and low and introduces a profane element into that of the sacral. In the maccaroni, following the tradition of the doggerel poesia maccheronica, the newly conferred graduands, who now possess knowledge and skills beyond everyday life, dance in a procession around the building as well as outside singing a silly song without any sensible message.
This carnivalisation brings about a ritual return from a mystical journey back to everyday life while also helping – after formal rules and internal regulations of the conferral play – to process everything that has taken place as a kind of play not to be taken too seriously. At the same time, those who are elevated exhibit through their ridiculous behaviour humility in front of rest of society in order to re-enter it alongside their peer citizens. Studies in psychology and social sciences show that rhythmic shared activity creates through music and kinesthetics a sense of belonging to a unified group.
As in many communal rituals and ceremonies, the conferment ceremony also has a strong transtemporal aspect. Alongside the current graduands, masters and doctors conferred half a decade earlier are conferred as jubilee masters and doctors. This is a way for each conferment ceremony to look both to the future and to the past. In particular, this is emphasised in the addresses from previous ceremonies, delivered by the jubilee masters and doctors, which may have gone through several 50-year cycles, the oldest ones being from the late 18th century. The past and past generations are strongly present. At the same time, the ceremony provides an opportunity to perceive the relativity of time; 50 years seems simultaneously like a long and a short time. However, the world and societies change a great deal over that period of time.
The conferment ceremony is a meeting place for various academic cohorts: graduates, i.e., masters and doctors leaving their alma mater; University staff: symbolic returnees, i.e., jubilee masters and doctors; honorary doctors and guests from outside the University; as well as marshals convened from among the students, many of whom will be future members of conferment committees. It also forms, especially for those active in student nations, faculty and student organisations as well as the Student Union, a natural next stage for putting to use their conversational, dinner etiquette, dress and dancing skills honed in annual celebrations. To quote an inspector of one student nation, out there in the wider world there are separate fancy schools for diplomats, but in Finland we have student organisations, such as student nations, where you learn skills required in the ballrooms outside Finland.
When reminiscing about past conferment ceremonies, academic individuals and generations long since passed are remembered. This tradition of showing respect to past generations was forcefully brought home during the ball of the 2023 conferment ceremony of the Faculty of Philosophy, where one chair of honour was carried to pay homage to the late Professor Matti Klinge. Klinge played a major role in defending conferment ceremonies in the 1970s when such traditions experienced strong opposition from the contemporary politically-conscious elites. He was also a regular guest at conferment balls and as such familiar to many graduands of various conferment ceremonies. In the year 2023, he would have also been celebrated as jubilee head marshal. A doctoral hat and a bouquet of flowers were symbolically carried in a chair of honour by doctors led by the chancellor to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march. The conferment ceremony is a celebration of goodbyes and welcomes. New masters and doctors are welcomed to assume their new rank and role in the community. But it is simultaneously a celebration of goodbyes. For many the conferment ceremony is their last ceremony at the University and a watershed between their student life, the last stage of the prolonged modern youth, and adulthood. To quote a graduand, after the conferment of degrees, you find yourself an adult without a clear understanding of what you want to do as an adult.
The mythical scholarship itself, central to the identity and narrative of the university together with knowledge and learning, discovered and received from the world by those instructed and anointed in the scholarly method are forcefully present in conferment ceremonies. On a symbolic level, conferment ceremonies create strong analogies between sacred knowledge, light, and truth external to this ordinary world to the service of which graduands are ordained in the ceremony. The sacral stage is emphasised by the tripartite nature of the ritual, the sacred and sacral symbols and elements derived from the various eras of Western history, such as the laurel wreath from ancient Greece and Rome, the ring from the swearing of oaths of Germanic peoples, the doctoral hat descended from the hats of the free riders of Eurasian plains and Persian gods, and the doctoral sword with its links to medieval knighthood and the l’ancien regime.
The sacral lifts the event and the whole ceremony out of ordinary world, but not into a separate vacuum without connections to the profane everyday world, since conferment participants starting their journey in the profane world return from the sacral magic circle back to their profane ordinary existence through the ball and the night procession. The sacral sphere is also forcefully introduced to conferment ceremonies by the conferment church service following the ceremonial conferral of degrees, with the event concretely focusing on religion and God’s theological role in the semantic fields of knowledge and truth.
To borrow from live action role-playing vernacular, conferment ceremonies have gamemasters maintaining and passing on the ‘lore’. Gamemasters are a group of individuals who have fulfilled various roles in earlier conferment ceremonies and are maintaining and passing down information for new conferment ceremonies. Previous official wreath-weavers, earlier conferment committees and a group consisting of University staff serve as these kinds of teachers. Gamemasters or play directors personally participating in relating and maintaining the narratives are various individuals, such as officials, chair of the conferment committee, speakers, etc.
In a way, long before live-action role-playing games the conferment ceremony has come up with an idea of a game based on reality, a ‘pervasive game’ This idea is based on that developed by Huizinga of ‘man the player’ and the significance of play in the history of humanity in all ages. Like the sacral sphere and van Gennep’s liminality, ordinary rules and reality stall for a while in Huizinga’s magic circle as the participants move outside them in a state of play, in a way a state of game, dictated by the rules and reality of the play or drama.
In fact, a sword whetter following the rehearsals for a 2023 conferment ceremony, compared it to a game of chess, where graduands – dressed in black and white – move like chess pieces on the board. The similarity to a game chess is further driven home in the master graduands’ Contredanse Française where the alternating rows of black and white attires create chess-like patterns when observed from the balcony.
The procession at the end of the ceremonial conferral of degrees, when the academic community exits the University for all and sundry, tourists included, to see, is infused with a feeling of an ancient spectacle and performance. The conferment ceremony can be simultaneously experienced and interpreted as a grand ritual, a rite of passage, a celebration, drama, live-action role play, play, or a game, the list goes on and on.
Thanks to the decision by the University Senate and Emperor Alexander II in 1862, conferment ceremonies have for over 150 years fulfilled an important function of modern rituals as defined by Harvengt, namely, voluntary participation. While earlier rituals were compulsory to all members of society, the decision by the open-minded emperor to allow organising conferment ceremonies for those who wanted to participate in them, – while also enabling graduation with a valid degree for those who did not participate in the ceremony – in practice modernised conferment ceremonies as rituals. The aspect of voluntariness is part of the modern ritual; the participants have chosen to partake and to pay the participation fee. No one is forced to attend a conferment ceremony, all participants have made the decision to do so.
At the same time, conferment ceremonies were always pressured by another feature of the development of modern rituals, individualisation. Each time, there is a drawing of boundaries and policies on how much the ritual can be adjusted to accommodate wishes and desires of individual graduands, and how much the shared and general ritual should be adhered to in order to retain inclusivity and to add another link to the chain of conferment ceremonies. Reforms violently breaking the narrative and structure built over centuries always endanger the continuity and the participants’ experience of the authenticity and originality of the conferment ceremony and the ritual. Successful adjustments are those that can be built and integrated into existing elements while managing to make the past and the present work together by changing emphases and relations between the elements.
Good examples include the dissolution of gender-based roles in the conferment ceremony in the 2000s as the official wreath-weavers came to be understood more as heralds of the spring and youth than just through their old role as the queen of the ball. In a way, this change was impending for roughly a century as male official wreath-weavers were anticipated already during the 1890s when increasing numbers of women graduates started participating in conferment ceremonies , bringing with them male wreath-weavers to join the conferment procession as wreath-weavers. Another example of change and continuity is the non-denominational laurel ceremony which developed alongside the conferment church service in the 2010s. The laurel ceremony takes place concurrently with the church service and each participant is free to choose which event to join in the procession completing the ceremonial conferral of degrees. This again allows for the voluntariness typical of modern rituals to occur.
One typical feature of rituals is their rigidity, severity, and rigour. Rituals must have a form and a formula dictated by some figure of authority, which the participants can follow to complete the ritual in question. In their absence, the human mind will not consider it a ritual and a rite, the requirements of rituals and play are not fulfilled and the mind will not receive the pleasure and psychological feedback it craves. In conferment ceremonies, this hard aspect is most clearly seen in the rigour of the ceremony, including its dress code and financial sacrifices in the form of participation fees, acquisitions and time.
In part, these are sacrifices in the modern rite to give meaning to the ritual and its symbolism, transition, and so on. In a way reminiscent of religio in ancient Rome, it seems that there continues to persist an idea in the subconscious minds of western postmodern academic individuals about genuinely important things requiring great and concrete sacrifices, deeds and resources from those pursuing them. In ancient Rome, religio meant first and foremost trade with gods through sacrifices, in Latin Do ut des, ‘I give so that you may give’. In exchange for protection and blessing the appropriate god was given sacrifices. Sacrifices were taken away from unfavourable gods unless it was felt that the god, if angered, would punish the whole clan or town with a scourge of some description, in which case sacrifices were considered a type of insurance made to keep evil powers satisfied.
Likewise, modern graduands make a sacrifice to the mythical spirit of the conferment ceremony to receive the ritual and the concomitant significance to their academic achievement as well as the external insignia of their degree. Currently, in a postmodern manner, the experience of the conferment ceremony itself is emphasised and considered an important output of the ritual. Interestingly, this search for rigour and sacrifice shows as a kind of an after effect of the Christian idea of suffering as paving the way for receiving life as a ‘victor’s crown’, an idea which dates back to the early days of Christianity and refers to the crowns of martyrs, which in turn is linked with the history of the laurel wreath.
Throughout their history conferment ceremonies have given rise to opinions both for and against. In the 17th century, feasting, gluttony, drunkenness and, worst of all, consorting with women unbecoming of priests was frowned upon. In the 18th century, the cost of the attire required for the ceremony was a source of annoyance and the education commission established by the Estates sought to get rid of conferment ceremonies together with faculties and the rest of academia, which were considered antiquated. In the 1870s, Finnish women defended conferment ceremonies as society feasts to which also women had a significant decree of access, consequently demanding conferment ceremonies even though the first woman stepped on the podium as a graduand as late as in1882.
After the Finnish independence, penny-pinching individuals complained about wasting funds in vanities such as celebrations, and at the end of the 1960s the whole ritual was labelled as a relic of a bygone era, which should have the good sense to step aside and disappear, giving way to a more efficient design of society based on sociological doctrines. Despite voices and opinions raised in opposition to conferment ceremonies through centuries, the tradition and ritual persist – at the time of the writing of this in the 2020s – even more forcefully than ever since the 1950s.
The fact that conferment ceremonies have been criticised throughout their history speaks of their significance as well as their communal and cultural force. If conferment ceremonies were void of importance, it seems unlikely that anyone would bother criticising them. Thus far the predicted disappearance of conferment ceremonies as remnants of medieval mysticism in otherwise rational universities that give way to a more efficient world has not materialised. Based on the accumulated observations, it seems safe to assume that the above hypothesis needs to be adjusted.
Rephrasing an old Christian saying, man does not live by sense alone. Rather, sense needs sentiment at its side and precisely the kind of mysticism that the soon thousand-year-old communal ritual represents. Celebrating academic degrees in an opulent and tangible manner makes them meaningful to the participants and provides them with a channel to process tensions related to big upheavals in their life situation, such as graduation. Following the research conducted by Dimitris Xygalatas, people need rituals and ceremonies, and if these are not available, they will develop them. According to his research results, rituals and suchlike are even good for mental health, as they create order and predictability, in other words, they create balance in the often chaotic world of our lives.
Conferment ceremonies are one of the great rituals and ceremonies in which the secularised and rationalised contemporary world meet a wide array of symbols, rituals and stories comprising a holistic experience. The academic community builds itself and its story by gathering together in a ceremony such as the conferment ceremony to reminisce the past, welcome new members and renew the identity of their community.
Pasi Pykälistö. MA
(Text last updated on 13 May 2024)