The ‘Canadian Tradition’ of Academical Costume in Nova Scotia: The Dalhousie University Model

The eleven degree-granting institutions in Nova Scotia represent a variety of systems and traditions of academical costume. By 1807, the University of King’s College (1789), the oldest university in Nova Scotia, borrowed the academical dress of Oxford University, while l’Université Sainte-Anne, where the use of cap, toge, and épitoge is comparatively recent, is in the tradition of French and Quebec-based institutions. Several schools, including St Mary’s University, St Francis Xavier University, Mount St Vincent University, and the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, follow the rules of the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume as developed in the United States in the 1890s. Other schools follow the ‘Canadian tradition’ of academical dress that Humphries describes. It could be argued, however, that this was, and is, in fact, a trans-Atlantic migration of the British academical tradition. G. W. Shaw points out that ‘each uni-