Adrian College
Michigan
1859
Information about the traditional canary yellow and black colors of Adrian College is not available at this time. Today the college colors are gold and black.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): lavender/white (1895); canary/blue (1911); canary/black (1912); orange/black (1913); canary/black (1914-1915); yellow/black (1916); canary/black (1917-1935)
The chapter on American academic hoods in the 1923 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Colleges and Universities by Frank Haycraft included a description of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume and a long list of schools, each with a description of its hood lining. The chapter was written in a way that implied that this list was from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart interpreted by Haycraft to indicate the lining color of the school’s hood and the second color in the chart interpreted to indicate the chevron color of the school’s hood. That said, some of the schools in Haycraft’s book did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac or are listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the IBAC and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac.
Adrian College is an example of an institution that did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the college’s hood lining description cited by Haycraft might have been from information he received from the Intercollegiate Bureau around 1912. Haycraft described Adrian’s hood lining as canary yellow with a black chevron. However, the first definitive IBAC description of the college’s hood was from 1927; here it was described as “canary yellow above black”, which was how the Bureau described a hood lining that was divided either per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. At this point the per chevron division was more common.
The IBAC must have revised Adrian’s heraldic pattern to distinguish the college’s hood lining from the hood lining that had by that point already been assigned to Southwestern University in Texas (canary yellow with black chevron). Adrian’s hood lining pattern did not change in subsequent IBAC lists.