Florida Southern College
Florida
1883
Formerly “Southern College”
Students at Southern College voted to make blue and white their school colors not long after the college was founded in 1883. When Southern College became Florida Southern College in 1935 the school’s academic colors changed to scarlet and white, and scarlet was added to the college’s former blue and white athletic uniforms to create new athletic colors of red, white, and blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (1934-1935)
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Bureau director Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. Beginning in 1895, one of the other heraldic divisions Leonard employed was what he called “[color] and [color]”, most likely referring to a “parti per pale” division whereby the two colors were divided vertically in the lining of the hood with the description being understood as “[left side] and [right side]” of the hood lining.
For example, between 1927 and 1935 Southern College was assigned a hood lining with a per pale division of its colors, according to a 1948 IBAC list that described the college’s hood lining as “blue and white”. Reflecting the changes to Southern’s name and school colors that had occurred in 1935, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the hood lining of Florida Southern as being a single color of “blood red”. An IBAC list from 1969 simply said that Florida Southern’s hood had a single color without specifying the hue, and a 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list had contradictory information: a citation for “Florida Southern” said the hood lining was red, but a citation for “Southern” said that the hood lining was “blue over white” (which contradicted the Bureau’s 1948 description for Southern College).
To rectify these problems, and to avoid confusion with the single color hood linings already assigned to Rutgers University (scarlet) and the University of Wisconsin system (cardinal) in the 1890s or early 1900s, Florida Southern has been reassigned a hood lining that employs the heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume originally assigned to Southern College between 1927 and 1935, but with the post-1935 colors of Florida Southern College. This is a unique hood lining pattern not used by any other college or university.