American International College
Massachusetts
1885
When American International College was founded in 1885, the trustees and faculty of the college adopted yellow and white as the school colors. The shade of yellow had a golden or slightly orange tint. Black was added as a third color later, possibly in 1933 when the college first began competing in intercollegiate athletics as the “yellow jackets”.
To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. In IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hood lining patterns were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]”, which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. Unfortunately, today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.
Because metallic fabrics were not used by academic costume manufacturer Cotrell & Leonard (which was also the depository for the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume), the Bureau assigned color descriptions of “golden yellow” and “gold” in a roughly synonymous manner, if the shade of the sample fabric a college or university sent was a golden yellow or light orange color.
For instance, the school colors of American International College were (golden) yellow and white, but the IBAC assigned the college a hood lined “gold above white”, according to IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972. The Bureau did not describe how the two colors were divided. Lists compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) said that the heraldic division was per chevron, but described the hood lining colors as old gold (not gold) and white, which suggests a stronger orange or brown tint to the college’s yellow. Here American International College’s correct colors of golden yellow and white have been used.