As a light March rain began to fall on Founder’s Green, the first audience members arrived for Ben Fligelman’s final hat changing ceremony. This would be the last time the senior, Student’s Council Co-President, and verifiable campus character performed the biannual event wherein his winter flatcap and summer panama hat are exchanged.
Anticipation and curiosity were high: where would Fligelman emerge from this time? Which texts would he quote? The flyers for this ceremony, posted liberally around campus in the preceding week, had been ambiguously themed: a black and white geometric motif heralded Fligelman changing his hat “FOR THE LAST TIME.”
Fligelman burst forth from the doors of Founders Hall—a divergence from prior years, when he would appear from the doors of VCAM directly opposite— crying “Salutations!” to the audience, the greeting reciprocated heartily. He began with three expressions of gratitude: first, to Iris Kim (BMC ‘26), dear friend and producer of every ceremony. Second, to Jesse Lim (HC ‘26), “right hand man” and “spiritual council.” Third, to the audience, for their attendance at ceremonies past and present.
He first addressed one of the questions that was surely on the mind of every hat-changing fan, and had been for multiple semesters: what would happen next year, when Fligelman had graduated? Would a successor be nominated? Would the ceremony die right here and now?
Fligelman first changed his hat in the fall of his sophomore year. On each winter solstice and spring equinox, he gives a speech from the steps of Founders Hall to a crowd which has grown steadily larger with every passing year. Yet as he has said before, it’s part of the ceremony’s magic that he would change his hat even if nobody came. “The stock and trade of the ceremony is authenticity,” he told the Bi-Co News. “If it becomes too much a performance, it ceases to mean anything at all.”
Fligelman’s speech traditionally incorporates quotations from pieces of literature, scripture, etc that he’s been reflecting on in that season of his life. Last fall’s event focused on love and resurrection, including quotations from St. Paul and Henrik Ibsen, among others. This spring, with a future beyond Haverford growing nearer and nearer, the ceremony embraced the immutability of change. Indeed, before looking to the future, Fligelman declared, “Just as the Angel of History always faces backwards, so too must we turn to the past.”
It seems right to note here that Fligelman’s senior thesis in the Religion Department focuses on Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time—Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” employs Paul Klee’s image of the Angel of History as a representation of his theory. Where Fligelman’s thesis discusses how “the past makes claims on us that we must make good on,” he says, the Hat Ceremony addresses how “the past makes claims on us that, occasionally, we must reject.”
And what do we find among the “icons” of the past? This year, Fligelman selected citations from Emily Dickinson, John Cheever, (“who loved transformation more than anything else in the world but was more afraid of change than he was of death”) and Thomas Wolfe (“who told us: ‘you can never go home again’”). Fligelman told The Bi-Co News that he chose these quotations after sifting through the most important ones of his life, those which are “constitutive” of his person. These three figures supported Fligelman in communicating his ultimate message: that by joining together in community, we can step confidently into an uncertain future.
With this in mind, Fligelman gave the crowd its answer: “This year, we will change from a perishable hat, to an imperishable one. Next year, the hat will still change. If not atop our head, then in our heart.”
Thus, at the apex of the event, the crowd witnessed Fligeman remove his flatcap and toss it into the crowd, leaving his head radically unadorned. But not before a final quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald, one which he keeps close to his heart (literally—he keeps a pocket copy of the text in his breast pocket at all times):
“Gatsby believed in the green light. The orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter! Tomorrow, we’ll run faster, stretch out our arms further. And one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Since Removing The Hat, Fligelman says he’s been able to experience the spring weather with even greater enjoyment than usual. And it has allowed him to finally live by the hat etiquette he’d once disregarded—to always remove a hat indoors. It’s also a great way to start “microdosing vulnerability,” he told the Bi-Co News. “The hat is all about mediation. The hat is a form of generalized media that protects me from the rest of the world. And now it’s gone.”
Fligelman hopes the audience came away understanding that “the hat belongs to them now.” He added, “The idea of the ceremony, in my mind, is that the hat has gone from being this transcendent thing isolated atop my head to something that now belongs to the whole community.”
