Goucher College
Maryland
1885
Formerly the “Woman’s College of Baltimore “
Students at the Woman’s College of Baltimore chose dark blue and old gold as their college colors in 1889. But when the school became Goucher College in 1910 the colors were changed to blue and gold, if citations in the World Almanac are accurate. Having said that, other contemporary sources described Goucher’s shade of blue as a dark blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): dark blue/old gold (1906-1910); blue/gold (1915-1935)
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) was affiliated with the academic costume firm Cotrell & Leonard, and one of the partners in this firm, Gardner Cotrell Leonard, was also the Director of the IBAC. So one way to estimate the date a school was assigned a hood lining pattern by the Bureau is to note when that school was first advertised as being a client of Cotrell & Leonard.
The Woman’s College of Baltimore first appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1897 “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook, but it was also mentioned in a newspaper article in the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896), which described the Women’s College of Baltimore as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. These two sources suggest an IBAC registration date for Baltimore’s hood in 1895 or 1896, but neither one described the actual color pattern used in the college’s hood. The school colors were dark blue and old gold at that time.
By 1918 the Woman’s College of Baltimore had changed its name to Goucher College and its hood was being described in an IBAC list as having a dark blue lining with a gold yellow (light orange) chevron. The college’s original “dark blue” hood lining was described as “Wellesley blue” (a medium to dark shade of blue) beginning with a 1927 IBAC list, and at the same time “gold yellow” was described as “gold”. Unfortunately this was the same description the Intercollegiate Bureau used for the hood lining of Simmons College in that 1927 list.
This hood lining duplication happened more often among schools with popular color combinations like blue and gold. As the number of IBAC-registered schools increased during the early 1900s, and as the number of IBAC-registered schools with the same college colors increased, the Bureau found it increasingly difficult to avoid duplicating the hoods they assigned to these colleges and universities that used the same colors. To solve this problem, the IBAC used distinctive heraldic divisions for some schools, but also began to employ semantic slights-of-hand to disguise the fact that schools were being assigned hoods that were, practically speaking, identical.
For instance, in the 1918 IBAC list discussed above there were no less than three schools that had been assigned identical dark blue and gold hood linings by the IBAC: Goucher College (dark blue with a gold yellow chevron), the University of Pittsburgh (navy blue with a gold yellow chevron), and Simmons College (dark blue with a gold chevron). Although each IBAC description is differently-worded, each hood is essentially the same design: a dark blue lining with a gold or light orange chevron.
These duplications have been avoided here by using the original Intercollegiate Bureau hood assignment for each school, and if necessary, assigning a unique heraldic division of the colors in each school’s hood lining. There is historical precedent for this because double chevrons, triple chevrons, colors divided parti-per chevron, and horizontal bars (what the Intercollegiate Bureau called “zones”) were already being used by the IBAC in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but it is not known today why the Bureau did not use these and other heraldic divisions more often.
So to avoid duplicating the identical IBAC hood patterns assigned to the University of Pittsburgh and Simmons College, the earliest (c.1896-1897) Intercollegiate Bureau assignment for the Woman’s College of Baltimore has been retained (probably dark blue with an old gold chevron). But to avoid duplication with the earlier hood lining the IBAC assigned to Allegheny College (navy blue with an old gold chevron), the chevron in Goucher’s hood lining has been inverted.
