Georgia State University
Georgia
1913
Formerly the “Evening School of Commerce”, the “Georgia Evening College”, and the “Georgia State College of Business Administration”
The Evening School of Commerce separated from Georgia Tech in 1933 to create the new Georgia Evening College for working students. In 1938 red and white were officially selected as the school colors of the college: red from the University of Georgia’s red and black school colors and white from Georgia Tech’s white and old gold school colors. In 1947 Georgia Evening College merged with the University of Georgia but became independent again in 1955 and was renamed Georgia State College of Business Administration. In early 1957 Georgia State students voted to make red and gray the colors of the college, with the gray being of a light shade similar to the college’s original white. In 1990 red and gray were changed to red, white, and blue.
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 a college or university’s hood, but by 1918 Bureau director Gardner Cotrell Leonard was also using was what he called a “wide chevron”. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the wide chevron hood lining used a chevron with a width of 4½ inches, five inches, six inches, or more. The IBAC did not assign a wide chevron very often, as it tended to hide the color above the chevron when the hood was folded and worn, which gave the lining the appearance of being divided per chevron.
The Bureau must have assigned a hood lining to Georgia State College of Business Administration in the late 1950s. The college’s hood lining first appeared in a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962), described as silver gray with a wide “spectrum red” chevron. “Silver gray” described a light gray and “spectrum red” was a visible spectrum red – in other words, a “true red”. An IBAC list from 1972 simplified the description of the chevron color to “red”; otherwise, the description of the college’s hood lining was unchanged. The IBAC assigned Georgia State a wide chevron because Stevens Institute of Technology used similar colors and had already been assigned a hood with a standard-width red chevron.
For reasons explained above, here Georgia State’s wide chevron has been changed. An inverted chevron has been substituted, giving each of the major Georgia state schools a different heraldic division of their colors: per chevron for the University of Georgia, a chevron for Georgia Tech, and a reversed chevron for Georgia State.