Graduation ceremonies have long been formal occasions, featuring monochromatic fields of gowns and mortarboards as students commence their post-college lives in ritualistic fashion.
Observers of these ritual ceremonies now find decorated grad caps proclaiming "LOL BYE," "Game of Loans," and "Nevertheless, she persisted." The stately academic decorum is punctuated with DIY adornment of pop-culture characters and social media memes. Some grad caps hint at obstacles overcome or future plans. Others offer memorials and even three-dimensional pastoral landscapes.
When Sheila Bock noticed the proliferation of decorated caps at a 2011 commencement, her "folklore radar went off."
"This was a tradition that was truly from the ground up rather than the top down and happening in highly formal settings. The use of social media has made this more widespread," says Bock, a professor of interdisciplinary, gender and ethnic studies at 51ԹϺ, whose publications have included “Ku Klux Kasserole and Strange Fruit Pies: A Shouting Match at the Border in Cyberspace” and "‘What Happens Here, Stays Here’: Selling the Untellable in a Tourism Advertising Campaign.”
She began photographing the caps and gathering the stories behind them. In 2016, she launched an official study and approached the Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University (from which she received her master’s and doctoral degrees) to help create a digital archive of the materials. Officially titled “Decorated Mortarboards: Forms and Meanings,” the project invites participation through surveys, interviews, and social media posts with #gradcaptraditions.
"The materials are so interesting and so rich that I didn't want to just collect these things and store them in my own files," Bock says.
These vernacular forms of creative expression convey both humorous and profound messages, providing an informal barometer of the era. The decorations may speak to the experiences of being an immigrant in the U.S. or to the challeng