Hood lining assignments by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (1948)

The 1927 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Universities and Colleges by Frank W. Haycraft included a complete list of academic hood lining patterns from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume. After Haycraft’s death in 1943, his friend E.W. Scobie Stringer used information Haycraft had been compiling since the 1927 edition to publish a revised and enlarged 4th edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Universities and Colleges. The Cheshunt Press published Haycraft and Stringer’s work in 1948.

Their chapter on American academic costume is sourced from information sent to Stringer by the Intercollegiate Bureau c.1946, including another complete list of academic hood lining patterns. About 123 new colleges and universities have been added to those in the 1927 list. Again, many of the colleges and universities in the 1948 list had not been officially assigned a hood lining pattern by the Bureau, so the school color information the Intercollegiate Bureau had in its database was applied to a “generic” single-chevron pattern.

This created the appearance that the Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned duplicate hood linings to a large number of schools. This is not entirely correct; while the Bureau occasionally assigned similar or duplicate hood linings (either accidentally or on rare occasions deliberately), whenever possible it continued to assign unique heraldic patterns to colleges and universities that requested them, especially for clients of the Cotrell & Leonard firm where the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume was housed.

But by 1948 Cotrell & Leonard’s share of the academic costume market was shrinking, which meant that many of the schools on their list were not clients and had procured hoods from competitors, who were not aware of the Bureau’s list or misunderstood the “generic” hood lining pattern cited therein as their customer’s “official” hood lining assignment from the Bureau.

This entropy of the system would accelerate into the late 1950s, when the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic finally abdicated the hood lining pattern and Faculty color responsibilities it had been given by the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume in 1895, handing these responsibilities over to the American Council on Education, which has not shown much interest in adjudicating these issues.