Joy was in the air that late-spring night 31 years ago in Somerdale, N.J. And hats, too —lots of them.
Trudy Kuehner had risen to her feet along with her fellow graduating seniors at Sterling Regional High School when —thwack! —a spinning mortarboard caught her smack in the back of the head, opening a long gash.
“I was standing there, crying, and everyone thought they were tears of joy,” she recalls.
Finally a teacher noticed that she was bleeding and hurried her to the emergency room. Stitches were called for, but Ms. Kuehner was a few hours shy of 18, so she had to wait for either midnight or the arrival of her parents, who could not immediately be reached in that long-ago age before cellphones ruled the earth.
Curious nurses and doctors would occasionally stop by. “Are you the one who was hit by a hat?” they’d ask, then walk away giggling.
It wasn’t particularly funny at the time, says Ms. Kuehner, who doesn’t recall how many stitches she ended up with. But she does remember this: “Those corners are sharp!” If a mortarboard gets some velocity, she says, it can knock you down.
Or worse. A 1979 paper in the American Journal of Ophthalmology describes the harrowing experience of another 17-year-old graduate, a girl who was struck across the right eye. “She had immediate loss of vision, and could not see her hand in front of her face in the affected eye,” the report says. Five months after the injury, her sight was still moderately impaired.
Such injuries are the exception, though, and hat tossing is widely accepted, even encouraged. Besides, the administrator who forbids it almost guarantees that mortarboards will fly —probably at his head.
Anglia Ruskin University, in England, was widely ridiculed last year for banning hat tossing. “Health and safety gone mad,” is how one student leader described the policy. In fact, says a spokeswoman, the university had merely asked on its Web site that students not throw their hats because a wounded graduate had to be hospitalized several years ago.
Yale University appears to be the only American institution of higher education ever sued for a mortarboard injury. A motion filed in 1984 in Connecticut Superior Court describes how a commencement guest, one Mollie Levenstein, was struck in the eye by the sharp corner of a cap. The court held that “a mortarboard was neither inherently dangerous nor more likely to cause injury if improperly used than was any other angular object, thus it was not a dangerous instrumentality.”
Academic headwear has not always been angular. Angus Trumble traces its evolution in a recent article in the Yale Alumni Magazine. The square academic hat worn by most undergraduates descends from the 11th-century calotte, an ecclesiastical skullcap, writes Mr. Trumble, senior curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. Within a hundred years it had become the brimless cloth pileus, which gradually came into fashion among academics. By the middle of the 15th century, the hat had expanded into the rounded pileus rotundus, a version of which is still worn by many scholars today.
To save time and cloth —but probably not thinking about future medical bills —16th-century hatmakers created the square-topped pileus quadratus. It earned its permanent spot atop the academic head in 1675, Mr. Trumble writes, when the vice chancellor of the University of Oxford allowed aristocratic undergraduates to wear the quadratus.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1854 as the first recorded use of the slang “mortarboard” to describe the hat, because of its resemblance to the square, stub-handled tray that bricklayers used to hold their cement.
No one is certain when college graduates first considered the aerodynamic potential of mortarboards, but some sources cite June 7, 1912, as the dawn of ceremonial hat tossing. That was the first time graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy threw their “covers” en masse, says James W. Cheevers, curator of the academy museum.
Before then, he explains, cadets had to serve two years in the active fleet to earn their commissions. But American shipbuilding was booming, and the Navy desperately needed more junior officers, so the U.S. Congress voted to start awarding cadets their diplomas and their commissions simultaneously.
On their graduation day, the members of the Naval Academy’s Class of 1912 sat with their officer hats at the ready as they listened to the address by President William Howard Taft. When the ceremony concluded, the new officers no longer needed their midshipman hats.
“They spontaneously threw them up in the air to get rid of them,” says Mr. Cheevers. “It’s been a tradition ever since.”
To Mr. Cheevers’s knowledge, no one has ever been injured, though he adds, “I’ve felt some of those hats, and they do hurt.”
Ralph D. Lorenz is a planetary scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In his book Spinning Flight: Dynamics of Frisbees, Boomerangs, Samaras, and Skipping Stones (Springer, 2006), he describes why spinning objects behave the way they do. Mr. Lorenz and many others have studied all manner of flying objects, but to his knowledge, no one has ever examined the aerodynamics of mortarboards.
As every graduate knows, the commencement cap has an oval or round headpiece that descends from the square board, presenting a special problem to anyone trying to predict the hat’s trajectory. Mr. Lorenz was game to speculate via e-mail.
“I could imagine that in fact the round part acts to cause a pitch-down torque, which will tend to counteract the natural pitch-up tendency of a flat plate,” he says, similar to how the lip of a spinning Frisbee keeps the disc from rolling to the side. “In other words, a cap may fly better than a flat plate.”
Trudy Kuehner would probably agree. She is able to laugh about her commencement-night misadventure, but she has not dropped her wariness. In the 1990s she worked for her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, in the office that oversees ceremonies, and she spent many a spring afternoon on Penn’s Franklin Field as a commencement marshal.
Though she knew the odds were strongly against another injury, Ms. Kuehner says, “I always ducked and covered.”
