The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?

At the pub the other night I spent a long time watching the table across from ours, trying to work out what discipline the group belonged to. I'll warn you now, I don't have an answer, but I'm soliciting guesses.

Clues:

1. There were two old guys who looked like they should have retired long ago, both wearing casual clothes (jeans and t-shirts) and both with extreme amounts of white facial hair. I'm guessing they were the profs.
2. Then there were nine young people. All but one were female. They all looked like they were in their early twenties.
3. Every single one of the young women was wearing black. At least on top. Funky yet expensive-looking. And large, sometimes ethnic-looking jewelry.
4. They all had short-and-funky haircuts.
   
5. They were talking in groups of twos and threes, and while the conversations sounded friendly, none of them ever smiled.

So, it's a discipline where most students are female, but the profs are male. It's not law, because they weren't wearing suits. They were too dressed up to be anthropologists, and wearing too much black to be most sorts of scientists that I could recognise. And they take themselves too seriously.

So, history? Literature? Philosophy? They looked unhappy enough to be philosophers...

What does your radar tell you? Who do you think they are?