Emerson College
Massachusetts
1880
The IBAC assigned Emerson College a hood lined “royal purple above gold” no later than 1927, according to an Intercollegiate Bureau list from that period. However, all subsequent lists from the Bureau stated that the upper color is “purple”. This was a common abbreviation of “royal purple” used in later IBAC lists (probably to conserve space) but this makes it difficult to know whether the Intercollegiate Bureau was describing a royal purple or medium purple hue.
None of these IBAC citations defined how the two colors were divided. Fortunately, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Emerson’s hood lining as purple over gold, divided per bar.
Here the most accurate Intercollegiate Bureau hood lining colors from 1927 have been used, divided per bar.
Detailed historical information about the royal purple and gold colors of Emerson College is not available at this time.
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]” which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.
