Eastern Illinois University
Illinois
1895
Formerly “Eastern Illinois State Normal School” and “Eastern Illinois State Teachers College”
Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927 and 1948 described Eastern Illinois State Teachers College as having a hood lined blue with a single gray chevron. This appears to be nothing more than a record of the college’s colors applied to a hypothetical hood lining. The IBAC may have assigned Eastern Illinois a hood lining pattern in the late 1940s or 1950s because a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Eastern Illinois University’s hood lining as medium blue with two reversed silver gray (light gray) chevrons. Similarly, a 1972 IBAC list said that the university had been assigned a blue hood lining with two reversed gray chevrons. The Bureau appears to have assigned Eastern Illinois a hood lined with two inverted chevrons to avoid duplicating the hood assigned to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (blue with a silver gray chevron; now part of New York University) in the early 1900s.
Students at Eastern Illinois State Normal School selected blue and gray as their school colors in 1905. The shade of blue on vintage collegiate materials from the early 20th century ranges from an azure blue to a dark blue, with a medium shade of blue the most common. Eastern Illinois’s gray is consistently light.
