A college in the U.K. sees a potential risk for injury during graduation and has decided to change a long-standing tradition that happens at nearly every college worldwide.
The University of East Anglia near Norwich, England has banned the throwing mortarboards after graduation because the university is concerned that someone could be severely injured from doing so, according to Fox News. The university said that they had seen a fair number of injuries over time from people getting hit in the head by a mortarboard. Two other universities, Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and the University of Birmingham, have also restricted mortarboard throwing at graduations.
Instead, UEA suggested that students pretend to throw their mortarboards in the air, and then a photography company could photoshop in flying mortarboards. UEA also said that if someone wanted to purchase the photoshopped picture of graduates throwing their mortarboards, they will get a reduced price for the picture because it is not an authentic photo.
U.K’s Health and Safety Executive and its head of the public sector, Geoff Cox, said that colleges need to do their research before “repeating tired health and safety myths like this one.” Injuries can happen from getting hit by a mortarboard, but they are very rare. According to the American Journal of Ophthalmology, in 1979, a female high school graduate was hit in the eye and couldn’t see for a brief period of time. In 1984, a Yale University graduate sued the university after getting hit in the eye by a mortarboard, but the court ruled “a mortarboard was neither inherently dangerous nor more likely to cause injury if improperly used than was any other angular object, thus it was not a dangerous instrumentality.”
It might be refreshing for people to see that crazy rules on college campuses happens worldwide, not just America.
