Baylor University
Texas
1845
A student committee was created to choose school colors for Baylor University in the spring of 1897. While riding on a train to a debate tournament at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, several of the committee members looked out the window and noticed how beautiful the golden yellow dandelions and green grass looked. When they returned to campus they recommended green and gold as the school colors of Baylor. The student body voted in favor of this recommendation. The green was always a dark shade, often of a dark olive hue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): green/gold (1906-1935)
Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. If one assumes that a college or university was assigned a hood lining pattern by the Intercollegiate Bureau when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that lining pattern was approved by the Bureau. The first time Baylor University appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement was in the 1907 University of Texas Cactus yearbook, which suggests an IBAC hood assignment for Baylor in 1906 or 1907.
The advertisement did not describe the colors or heraldic pattern of Baylor’s hood lining, but the university’s hood was cited in an IBAC list from 1927 as being “olive green above gold”. The Intercollegiate Bureau defined “olive green” as a dark shade of green, and placing this color “above” gold could refer to a division per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. Although it was not clearly described in the 1927 IBAC description, for Baylor this indicated a heraldic division of the colors per chevron according to History of Academic Caps, Gowns and Hoods (National Academic Cap & Gown Co.: Philadelphia, 1940). The Bureau used a per chevron division of Baylor’s colors to avoid duplicating the hood lining already assigned to St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania (olive green with a gold chevron; today blue with a silver chevron).
By the 1960s, however, the IBAC seems to have reassigned Baylor a standard chevron pattern hood, and a 1969 IBAC list said that Baylor’s hood lining was “emerald green” with a gold chevron. Why these changes were made is unknown, but this was a duplication of the hood lining the Bureau had already assigned to the Pacific School of Religion in California. To avoid this problem, and to avoid unnecessary confusion with the hood linings assigned to McDaniel College and the University of Vermont, here Baylor’s original IBAC assignment has been restored.