06/04/2026
Why We Wear the Mortarboard: A Journey from Medieval Scholars to Yakima Valley Graduates
Every spring, as seniors in Prosser and Grandview line up in their gowns – tassels twitching in the wind that always seems to sweep across the Valley – few stop to wonder why they’re wearing a flat black square on their heads. The mortarboard is so familiar it feels timeless. But the cap that tops every graduation photo has traveled nearly a thousand years to get here. Its story begins not in a gymnasium or football field, but in the cloisters of medieval Europe.
From Monks’ Caps to Scholars’ Badges: In the 11th and 12th centuries, Europe’s first universities grew out of religious institutions. Students and teachers were often clergy, and their clothing reflected it. They wore simple skullcaps or “pileus” to keep warm in drafty stone halls and to signal their clerical status. By the 14th century, that skullcap evolved into the biretta, a square‑topped clerical hat with a tuft. It was practical, but it also became a visual shorthand for learning. If you saw someone in a biretta, you knew they belonged to the world of books, manuscripts, and disputations. That square top is the earliest ancestor of the mortarboard’s distinctive shape.
The Square Takes Over: By the 1500s and 1600s, academic dress had split into two styles: the pileus rotundus (round cap) and the pileus quadratus (square cap). The square version gradually became associated with higher academic standing. Then came a twist of politics. During the Restoration in England, clergy began enlarging the tops of their caps as a subtle show of resistance. The bigger the top, the more it needed stiffening. Over time, that stiffened square became the flat board we recognize today. Engravings from Oxford in the late 1600s show scholars wearing something unmistakably close to the modern mortarboard.
Crossing the Atlantic: When American colleges were founded in the 1600s, they imported English academic customs wholesale. But it wasn’t until 1895, when U.S. universities adopted the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, that the mortarboard became standardized nationwide. The Code required the square cap, the tassel, and the gown styles we still see today. By the early 1900s, the tassel‑moving ritual - from right to left - was firmly established. And with that, the mortarboard became the official American symbol of academic achievement.
Why “Mortarboard”? Leave it to Americans to give the cap a practical nickname. The flat square resembled the tool bricklayers used to hold mortar, and the name stuck. By the early 20th century, newspapers were already calling it a “mortarboard.”
From Protest to Personal Canvas: For most of its history, the mortarboard stayed plain. But during the Vietnam era, students began decorating their caps with peace signs and protest messages. What started as counterculture expression eventually became a mainstream tradition. Today, Yakima Valley graduates turn their caps into miniature billboards – honoring family, celebrating first‑generation pride, or adding a little humor to the moment. Walk the field at Prosser or Grandview High and you’ll see everything from glittered tributes to future careers to inside jokes only classmates understand. The mortarboard has become both a uniform and a canvas.
A Local Thread in a Long Tradition: There’s something fitting about this ancient academic symbol ending up here, in a region built by hands‑on work and generational effort. The same cap that once topped scholars in medieval Paris now sits atop students whose families prune vines, run small businesses, serve in local government, or work the hops and orchards that define the Valley.
Every June, when graduates toss those square caps into the air over Prosser’s Art Fiker Stadium or Grandview’s Rich Leenhouts Stadium, they’re participating in a tradition older than the United States itself.
The mortarboard may have started in monasteries, but it has found its home in communities like ours – where education is still seen as a step toward something better, something earned, something worth celebrating.
