American University of Beirut
Lebanon
1866
Formerly “Syrian Protestant College”
A detailed history of the Turkey red and white school colors of the Syrian Protestant College is not available at this time. “Turkey red” was a vibrant shade of red, identical to the scarlet red color of the flag of the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Syria when the college was founded in 1866.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) assigned the Syrian Protestant College a hood lining that was “Turkey red” with a white chevron between 1895 and 1910. Probably because this was too similar to the hood the IBAC had already assigned to Boston University (scarlet with a white chevron), by 1927 the Bureau reassigned the newly renamed “University of Beirut” a Turkey red hood lining with two white chevrons, a description that did not change in subsequent IBAC lists. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as “scarlet” with two white chevrons.
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the IBAC employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “double chevron” was also used quite frequently. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the double chevron pattern used two chevrons of about 1½ inches in width placed two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.