Northern Baptist Theological Seminary
Illinois
1913
Also known as “Northern Seminary”
Detailed historical information about the red and white school colors of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary is not available at this time, but the shade of red the seminary apparently used for most of its history was a bright red like scarlet.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): red/white (1923-1935)
The history of the hood lining pattern of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary is rather complicated.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) assigned the seminary a hood lining that was cardinal with a white “reversed chevron” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. “Cardinal” or “crimson” were color terms the Bureau often used to describe the “red” color adopted by some colleges and universities that didn’t otherwise specify their shade of red. The IBAC inverted the seminary’s chevron to avoid duplicating the hood lining pattern assigned to Dickinson College (cardinal with a white chevron) between 1895 and 1902.
However, the shade of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary’s red was brighter than cardinal, which made the seminary’s hood lining easily confused with that of the University of Puerto Rico (scarlet with a white reversed chevron). So the IBAC gave Northern Baptist Theological Seminary a new hood assignment, which was described in a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) as “bright red” with two white chevrons.
Unfortunately, this pattern was too similar to the hood lining the IBAC had already assigned to the American University in Beirut (Turkey red with two white chevrons). So in the 1960s the IBAC attempted to rectify this problem once and for all by inverting both chevrons of the seminary’s hood lining, because an IBAC list from 1972 described Northern Baptist Theological Seminary’s hood lining as “cardinal” (probably a transcription error from the Bureau’s 1927 list) with two reversed chevrons.
Here the final Intercollegiate Bureau heraldic pattern has been used with the seminary’s historical shade of bright red or scarlet.