Illinois Wesleyan University

Illinois

1850

official hood lining pattern
A felt beanie or "dink" cap from the 1920s or 1930s. The dark olive green color has faded with age.

On 16 May 1895, the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of academic costume for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The Intercollegiate Code stipulated that the college color or colors of the institution granting the degree would be used in the lining of the institution’s hood but did not define how multiple colors would be combined in the hood lining. One of the advisors to the Commission was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization affiliated with the academic costume manufacturing firm Cotrell & Leonard. Since 1887 the IBAC had maintained a database of information about academic regalia in the US and Europe, so the Commission entrusted the IBAC with the responsibility of assigning a unique hood lining design to every college and university that chose to adopt the Intercollegiate Code.

The Commission sent a copy of the Intercollegiate Code along with a list of schools and their colors to the Living Church Quarterly, which included this information in its 1896 edition (published in December 1895). The list of college colors the Commission appended to the Intercollegiate Code was largely copied from the 1894 World Almanac. But some colleges and universities in the Commission’s list did not appear in the World Almanac, or had different colors listed in the World Almanac, so the new information about these colors was probably supplied by Cotrell & Leonard from their client records.

A photograph from a c.1905 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue of a doctoral hood with a lining that used a heraldic pattern of this type.
white
olive green

Students at Illinois Wesleyan University selected white and olive green as their school colors in 1895. Previously the colors had been navy blue and light gray beginning in 1887, then steel gray and a purplish shade of navy blue (a royal blue color?) between 1892 and 1895.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): steel gray/navy blue (1895); white/green (1896); white/olive green (1897-1900); olive green/white (1902-1904); green/white (1906-1912); olive green/white (1913-1935)

A 1950s wooden souvenir figure carved by the Anri company in Italy, depicting the Illinois Wesleyan mascot, a "Titan" (Greek god)

Illinois Wesleyan was one of these schools. The old school colors of the university (steel gray and navy blue) appeared in the 1894 World Almanac but were cited as white and green in the Intercollegiate Commission’s list, which means Cotrell & Leonard supplied the university’s updated color information to the Commission. And since Illinois Wesleyan was a client of that firm, the IBAC is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the college in 1895 or 1896 that was white with a green chevron. But as more colleges and universities applied for hood lining assignments, the Bureau began to describe the shades of the hood lining colors with more specificity.

The first revised IBAC description of Illinois Wesleyan’s hood did not appear until 1927, when the college was stated to have a white lining with an olive green chevron. The Bureau used “olive green” to describe a dark shade of this color. At some point after 1948, the IBAC must have revised Illinois Wesleyan’s hood lining design to olive green above white, divided per chevron, as the university appeared with this description in a 1972 IBAC list. Three years earlier, though, in a 1969 list the Intercollegiate Bureau had described the lining as green (not olive green) above white, divided per chevron. As no other school had been assigned a white lining with an olive green chevron, it is not known why these changes were made; here the original c.1895-96 IBAC hood lining design has been used.