Hanover College
Indiana
1827
Detailed information about the history of the red and blue colors of Hanover College is not available at this time, but the shade of red was typically bright, like scarlet, and the shade of blue was dark, like navy.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/scarlet (1895-1897); dark red/dark blue (1900); navy blue/crimson (1902); blue/scarlet (1904); red/blue (1917-1935)
The 1896 Living Church Quarterly (published in December of 1895) contained a copy of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume along with a list of school colors supplied by the committee that wrote the Code. Among these colors were those for Hanover College – blue and scarlet – which the committee probably sourced from the 1894 World Almanac.
Not long thereafter the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) probably requested color samples from the college so that a hood lining pattern could be assigned, which was scarlet with a navy blue chevron according to an IBAC list from 1927. This description does not change in subsequent hood lining lists from the Bureau, although Kevin Sheard said the shade of red was “crimson” in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970).
Hanover’s hood lining assignment was confusingly similar to the one the IBAC assigned to Duquesne College (first “bright red” with a “Yale blue” chevron, later “scarlet” with a “navy blue” chevron – the latter description is identical to Hanover’s). This was an example of the Bureau’s tendency to assign the same hood to two or more schools but hide that fact by using synonyms for the colors. In this case, the IBAC assigned both Hanover and Duquesne a bright red hood lining with a dark blue chevron. Probably to avoid this duplication the Bureau later inverted Duquesne’s chevron.