North Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Science
North Dakota
1890
Formerly “North Dakota Agricultural College”
The faculty of North Dakota Agricultural College selected green and yellow as the colors of the college at a faculty meeting on 9 April 1909. Edward S. Keene, Professor of Engineering and Physics, moved that “green shade 65” and “yellow shade 140” be adopted. This motion passed and was later ratified by the Student Senate. Today it is not known what color system Professor Keene was referring to. In 1915 the shades of the agricultural college’s colors were officially defined in as “apple green” and “maize yellow”, which were descriptive terms quite appropriate for an agricultural college.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): apple green/corn yellow (1913); green/yellow (1914-1931); apple green/corn yellow (1934-1935)
Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927 and 1948 described North Dakota Agricultural College as having a hood lined green with a yellow chevron. This was probably a record of the college’s school colors applied to a hypothetical hood lining arrangement and not a hood lining pattern that had been officially assigned by the IBAC. Information in the World Almanac suggests these colors were recorded at some point between 1914 and 1931. The Bureau probably assigned North Dakota Agricultural College an official hood lining in the late 1940s or 1950s because a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described North Dakota State University’s hood lining as lemon yellow with a grass green chevron – a description repeated in a 1969 Intercollegiate Bureau list. An IBAC list three years later used the university’s official school colors to describe the hood lining as maize with an apple green chevron. Here the official Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume lining assignment from the post-World War Two period has been retained.