Iowa State University of Science and Technology
Iowa
1858
A week later, the newspaper reported that at
Thursday’s [Athletic] Council meeting the special committee appointed to investigate and report on suitable colors for the sweaters, reported in favor of a cardinal sweater with a gold letter…. This is a commendable improvement and makes a distinctive and striking set of colors. From the prominence of cardinal and gold at the Nebraska game, it is evident that common consent will very soon adopt these as the college colors.
In 1891, a committee of Iowa State College students selected gold, silver, and black as the school colors, but this decision quickly proved unpopular. It was time-consuming for the president of the college to secure the rolled graduation diplomas with three separate ribbons, and the Athletic Council had difficulty finding sweaters dyed in these three colors for the college’s athletes.
The 3 October 1899 student newspaper stated the matter plainly:
The matter of colors has proven a stumbling block and this is not to be wondered at. As we have stated before, the silver, gold, and black are approaching their last days. They are pretty, but absolutely impossible to use in any way that would uniform our athletes…[and] the colors adopted for a college athletic team determine what shall be the colors of the college. It follows then, that we should be … conservative and careful in this matter. What the [Athletic] Council does now will probably hold for all time and they must not blunder this time.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): gold, silver, black (1895-1897); cardinal/gold (1900-1935)
On 16 May 1895 the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of caps, gowns, and hoods for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The commissioners intended for every college and university to use a unique arrangement of its colors in the hood lining which would enable an observer to “read” the hood and thereby identify the alma mater of the hood’s owner. But as an article in the 27 July 1902 edition of an Albany, NY newspaper named The Argus recalled, “the combining of two or three colors in a lining was a great problem with the commission but was solved by [Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume Director Gardner Cotrell Leonard] after some study in heraldry by the chevron, double and triple chevron, and parti-per-chevron.” These heraldic divisions of the school colors became the means by which a variety of distinctive hood lining patterns could be individually assigned to each school that chose to follow the Intercollegiate Code.
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division Leonard’s Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods 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, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe.
The Intercollegiate Bureau assigned Iowa State College a hood lining that was “gold above cardinal”, according to a 1927 list, and a 1969 IBAC list definitively identifies the division of the two colors as being per chevron. The IBAC probably assigned Iowa State a per chevron pattern to avoid confusion with the hood linings already assigned to the University of Southern California (by that point, gold with a cardinal chevron), Loyola University in Chicago (gold with a crimson chevron), and Coe College (gold with a scarlet chevron; the correct shade was crimson).