Bowling Green State University
Ohio
1910
Dr. Homer Williams, Bowling Green State Normal School’s first president, formed a faculty committee in 1914 to select colors for the college. One afternoon in Toledo, a member of this committee, an industrial arts professor named Leon Winslow, happened to sit in a seat on a trolley behind a woman wearing a hat with brown and orange feathers. Dr. Winslow was struck by the beauty of this unusual color combination and suggested it to the other members of the committee, who agreed and voted to make burnt orange and seal brown the colors of the new college.
The committee stated that orange is the combination of red, symbolizing love, and golden yellow, symbolizing wisdom. Orange, therefore, symbolized the love of wisdom and the “vigor of youth”. Seal brown is a dark brown color, symbolizing the “good earth of the Buckeye-State”. The shades of orange and brown were defined as Munsell “yellowred 3/4” and Munsell “yellowred 7/8”. Dr. Winslow also designed the college seal in 1914.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) assigned a hood lining design to Bowling Green State University in the late 1940s or 1950s that was burnt orange with a dark brown chevron, according to an IBAC list from 1969. An earlier list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as burnt orange with a brown chevron. The most imprecise and generic description of Bowling Green’s hood lining was in a 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list that said the lining was orange with a brown chevron.
At an unknown date the administration of Bowling Green State University approved the optional use of a doctoral gown tailored from fabric in the university’s seal brown color. The black velvet sleeve bars and facings are edged with burnt orange piping, and Bowling Green’s seal is embroidered with burnt orange thread on the upper part of the black velvet facings of the gown.
Above and below are photographs of this gown and a Doctor of Philosophy hood from the Bowling Green State University bookstore. The seal brown color of the hood’s chevron is correctly dark, but the burnt orange lining is too gold.
