Iowa Wesleyan University
Iowa
1842
Detailed historical information about the royal purple and white school colors of Iowa Wesleyan College is not available at this time, but today the university’s colors have apparently been changed to purple and gold.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): royal purple/white (1896-1897); purple/white (1900); white/purple (1902-1931); purple/white (1934-1935)
To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau occasionally employed was a “zone” of color, which is how the IBAC described a horizontal bar. Like the chevron, the bar was approximately three to four inches in width and extended from one side of the hood lining to the other.
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume seems to have accidentally assigned Iowa Wesleyan College a hood lining that duplicated the hood linings already assigned to Asbury University or Texas Christian University, because all three institutions were cited as having a hood lined white with a purple chevron in 1927 and 1948 IBAC lists.
The Bureau corrected this mistake in the late 1940s or 1950s, because a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Iowa Wesleyan’s hood lining as white with a purple bar, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1972.
Because the Bureau often abbreviated “royal purple” as “purple” in its lists, the actual shade the IBAC assigned to the college’s “zone” cannot be certain. Sheard said it was purple, and since lighter and brighter colors were in vogue during the 1950s and 1960s, the college might have been using a medium shade of purple at that time. Here Iowa Wesleyan’s traditional royal purple has been used.