University of California system
Each institution in the system uses different athletic colors but the same academic hood lining pattern from the original University of California:
University of California, Berkeley
California
1868
University of California students chose blue and gold in 1873 to symbolize California’s blue skies and sandy beaches. The shade of blue was often described as “azure blue”, the same color as a clear blue sky. The second color, gold, was chosen separately by female students who noted the fact that California’s nickname is “The Golden State”, that the Golden Gate Bridge can be seen from campus, and that the golden poppy grows in California.
Over the next twenty years the IBAC seems to have allowed California’s chevron color to evolve into a darker shade of blue. By the mid-1920s the Bureau began describing the shade of California’s blue as “Yale blue”, a description that remained in all IBAC lists thereafter. The Intercollegiate Bureau used “Yale blue” to indicate a dark shade of blue.
But since University of California students originally selected blue to represent the blue skies of the state, and since the shade of blue was often described in contemporary materials as a shade of “azure blue”, a bright blue assignment has been used here as it seems to most accurately reflect the shade of California’s blue in 1900 when the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume first assigned the university a hood.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gold (1895-1935)
According to the University of California, Berkley, University Chronicle (June 1900), the Academic Council of the university adopted the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume on 30 March 1900. A 1901 advertisement in The Kenyon Reveille yearbook stated that California was a client of Cotrell & Leonard, the depository of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). The university’s hood lining was not described in either source, but the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, contained a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. In that source California was stated to have a hood lining that was gold with a blue chevron. The shade of blue used for the chevron on this hood was not precisely described, but it was a bright azure shade according to a lithograph published in 1902 by the Intercollegiate Bureau (see the illustration to the left).
