Colgate University
New York
1819
The school colors of Colgate University have been blue and magenta (1868-86), maroon and orange (1886-1900), and maroon alone from 1900 until the present. Today maroon is often combined with accent colors of gray or white, but these are not official colors of the university.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): maroon/orange (1895); maroon/yellow (1896); maroon/orange (1897-1900); maroon (1902-1935)
Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and also a partner at Cotrell & Leonard, one of the major manufacturing firms for academic dress in the United States. Because the relationship between the IBAC and Cotrell & Leonard was tight (contemporary materials described Cotrell & Leonard as the “depository” for the IBAC), it is likely that a school was assigned an academic hood lining pattern by the IBAC when that school made a purchase order for academic costume from Cotrell & Leonard. If this is correct, Cotrell & Leonard advertisements from the turn of the century can provide one with a rough estimation of the date when the hood lining pattern of a particular college or university was first registered by the IBAC.
Colgate University was first referenced (without a description of its hood) in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the June 1898 edition of the Hamilton Literary Magazine, which suggests an 1897 or 1898 registry by the IBAC. Previously, Colgate had been one of the schools in a list of college colors compiled by the 1894-95 Intercollegiate Commission to accompany the text of the Intercollegiate Code in 1895; here the university’s school colors of maroon and orange were probably copied from information in the 1894 World Almanac. These would have been understood to be the colors in the hood’s lining, and although the heraldic division of those colors was not specified in that list, the description likely would have been interpreted to refer to a hood lined maroon with an orange chevron.
This, however, would have duplicated the hood the Intercollegiate Bureau assigned to Rush Medical College in 1896, so for Colgate’s hood lining the IBAC must have either added a second chevron (maroon with two thin chevrons), used a “zone” (maroon with an orange bar), divided the colors per chevron (maroon above orange), or interchanged the two colors (orange with a maroon chevron). These were heraldic divisions used at this time to avoid hood design duplications, but an IBAC hood list from this period does not exist to confirm which of these hood lininge patterns the Bureau initially assigned to Colgate.
After Colgate dropped orange and made maroon the only official school color in 1900, the Intercollegiate Bureau redesigned the university’s hood lining; the first official IBAC description of Colgate’s hood can be found in a 1918 IBAC list where the lining is stated to be a single color of maroon. Colgate’s maroon hood lining was never modified after this.
Unfortunately, this post-1900 IBAC assignment of maroon duplicated the hoods of Chicago University (assigned in 1896) and Fordham University (assigned in 1896 or 1897) – duplications that can be seen in the published 1918 IBAC list.
To avoid this problem, here a hypothetical reconstruction of the original IBAC assignment c.1897 has been used, based on the hood the Bureau assigned to the Catholic University of America at about the same time. That said, it may be better to reassign Colgate to a new pattern using the current unofficial color combination of maroon and white.