University of Iowa
Iowa
1847
Formerly the “State University of Iowa”
A faculty committee selected gold as the school color for the State University of Iowa in 1886, specifying that “pure yellow” would be the shade when used as a fabric. But ribbons in an old gold color were used as examples, which led to some initial confusion over the exact shade of gold the committee had chosen. So in 1894 the shade was clarified as being old gold. Black was often used in combination with old gold, although it was not an official university color.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): old gold (1895-1931); black/gold (1934-1935)
The State University of Iowa was cited as a client of academic costume manufacturer Cotrell & Leonard in “The Cap and Gown in America”, a May 1893 article in The University Magazine written before the creation of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the December 1895 issue of the Yale Literary Magazine, and in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1896 Illio yearbook of the University of Illinois – all of which suggest an Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) registration of 1895 or 1896. A reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) also mentioned Iowa as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume.
None of these references described the university’s hood lining. But Iowa was one of the schools in a list of college colors compiled by the 1894-95 Intercollegiate Commission to accompany the text of the Intercollegiate Code in 1895; here the university’s school color was cited as old gold and this would have been understood to indicate a single-color hood lining.
There was also an Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume academic hood list from c.1912 that described Iowa’s hood lining as old gold. An identical description of Iowa’s hood lining was in a 1927 IBAC list.
Since Iowa had been a client of Cotrell & Leonard (the depository of the IBAC) prior to the creation of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code, it was probably one of the first colleges or universities to have been assigned a hood by the Intercollegiate Bureau. And since all of these early descriptions – and every IBAC description thereafter – were of a hood with a single color of old gold, one may say with a fair degree of certainty that the Bureau assigned Iowa an old gold hood lining very soon after the Intercollegiate Code was written in 1895.