College of Mount Saint Vincent

New York

1847

official hood lining pattern
white
gold
A photograph from a c.1905 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue that has been altered to illustrate a bachelor's hood lined with two chevrons.

According to College of Mount Saint Vincent: A Famous Convent School (1917) by Marion Brunowe and Anna Browne, on 11 April 1896, the Academy of Mount Saint Vincent Alumnae Association voted to make gold and white the colors of their association. The authors do not say whether this was the origin of what later became the college colors or if gold and white were already associated with the college at that time. In Our College Colors (1949), Henry L. Snyder says that gold and white were officially made the colors of the college in 1910 because they were the colors of the papal flag.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): gold/white (1923-1935)

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. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau frequently employed was a “double chevron”. 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 approximately two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.

The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume probably assigned the College of Mount Saint Vincent a hood lining that was gold with two white chevrons around 1902, when the IBAC was charted by the Regents of the University of the State of New York to “to maintain a register of statutes, codes and usages, designs and descriptions of the articles of academic costume and regalia with their correct colors, materials, qualities, sizes, proportions and the arrangement thereof” – especially for colleges and university in New York. IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972 consistently described Mount Saint Vincent’s hood lining as gold with two white chevrons, as did Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970).

Strangely, the Intercollegiate Bureau mistakenly assigned Shorter College the same hood lining, but Mount Saint Vincent’s assignment probably predates it.