Emmanuel College
Massachusetts
1919
The administration of Emmanuel College chose blue and gold as the official colors of the college in 1919 at the same time the school seal was designed. The seal features a shield surrounded by the name of the college. The background of the shield is blue and at the bottom of the shield are three mountains of gold. Above the mountains is an open Bible, with three white lilies behind it. The blue color of the shield is a medium shade of “true” blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gold (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. In IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hood lining patterns 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. Unfortunately, today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.
The IBAC assigned Emmanuel College a hood lining of this type no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. Initially the IBAC described the college’s hood as “Yale blue” (dark blue) above gold, but by 1948 the Bureau had revised the description to a more accurate (medium) blue above gold. A 1972 IBAC description is identical.
In none of these instances did the IBAC specify the heraldic division between the two colors. However, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Emmanuel’s hood lining as blue above gold, divided per chevron.
Here the direction of the heraldic division has been inverted to resemble the pointed shape of the three gold mountains at the bottom of the original college shield (today the mountaintops are semi-circular).