James Madison University
Virginia
1908
Formerly “Harrison State Normal and Industrial School for Women”, “Harrisonburg State Teachers College”, and “Madison College”
Students at Harrisonburg State Normal and Industrial School for Women chose violet and gold as their college colors in 1909 (one year after the founding of the college) by selecting one color from each of the two literary societies that had been formed on campus. But unofficially, the colors were more often described as “purple” and gold.
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the 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. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. 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 IBAC assigned Harrisonburg State Teachers College a hood lined “old gold above purple” at some point between 1909 and 1927. The school was renamed “Madison College” in 1938, and by 1948 the Bureau had changed the upper color in the college’s hood to its actual color of gold. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) likewise described the college’s hood lining as gold above purple, adding that the colors were divided per chevron.
The colors had been divided per chevron because Harrisonburg was the first college the IBAC assigned a hood lining with old gold above purple, but by the time the Bureau corrected the lining to gold above purple, Madison College was the third school to take this pattern after Elmira College and New Mexico Normal School (today Western New Mexico University). So here the hood lining for James Madison University has been redesigned gold above purple, divided per bar.