Cap and Gown

Debora Weber-Wulff
Happenings

Cap and Gown

Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog, one of the members of the "Eutin IT-Mafia" at the University of Kiel, was getting his habilitation. In Germany it is not enough to write one doctorate, you need to write two in order to be qualified for a "real" professorship. Claudia Herbers, Bettina Buth and I thought hard about a fitting present for him. I think that Martina Mengel was in on this one, too. Ernst-Rüdiger did his thesis on Petri-Nets, not exactly something with which you can do lots of fun things.

Since he had just spent some time in Holland as a guest professor and was waxing enthusiastic about the ceremony there for bestowing degrees, we decided he really needed a cap and gown for his habilitation. In Germany you normally just shake everyone's hand and then go get drunk, we thought a bit of ceremony would liven things up.

We got about 5 meters of nice black cloth at Merkur, some cardboard, black paper, and some white felt, and got to work. I took over the gown since I had a sewing machine, the others worked on a stole and a mortar board cap. We surreptiously peeked into his coat to find what size he wore, and I sewed a flowing gown with long sleeves. The stole took some work to get to sit right, we glued white felt into it and then with special glitter glue wrote the smallest Petri-Net in black on the white felt. I still had my (red) mortar board from high school, so we had a good pattern to go on for that.

Ernst-Rüdiger gave a marvelous lecture as part of the habilitation proceedings, then the faculty met to decide if he was worthy of the degree or not. We stood around with him helping him be nervous. When he went back in to receive his sentence we whipped out the cap and gown. Right after Hans Langmaack (who was his sponsor in all of this) had congratulated him, we approched with the gown. I gave a little speech and we dressed him in the gown, stole and cap - a really wonderful sight to see, if I ever get the pictures scanned that Martina took of all of this.

We got the cap wrong, it was just too small for his head, so he took that off pretty quick, but he proudly wore the gown and stole the rest of the day. And went on to be professor for computer science in Oldenburg.