Abstract:
In 2018 it was announced that Auckland University of Technology (AUT) would join the other seven universities in Aotearoa New Zealand in offering a higher doctorate qualification. As part of this process it became apparent that new academic dress would need to be designed and created. Working in the University’s Graduate Research School gave
me an opportunity to provide input, and as a result, I designed a new set of academic
dress for these qualifications in conjunction with the University’s official robemaker,
Paul Fielder, FBS.1
This provided a prompt to examine what academic dress there is for existing AUT
doctorates—so that the new qualifications (a DLitt and a DSc were introduced from
1 January 2019, with the first graduate due in late 2022) could be sympathetic to the
existing ones; and also to explore what the relationship is among doctoral academic
dress at the other universities in Aotearoa—so that the design of the new dress was not
reinventing the wheel. This research project builds on this examination to explore the
history and development of doctoral academic dress across Aotearoa.
This study found that there is a range of similarity across doctoral dress in universities
across New Zealand, with the six universities that were originally constituents
of the University of New Zealand being the most similar (as at one point they shared a
common academic dress).
