Kansas Wesleyan University
Kansas
1886
The school colors of Kansas Wesleyan University were originally lavender and white, but around 1895 they were changed to royal purple and old gold. That said, the university was not consistent in the way it described these colors: early collegiate materials describe them as either royal purple or purple, and either old gold or gold.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): white/lavender (1895); old gold/royal purple (1896); old gold/purple (1897-1900); purple/old gold (1902-1912); purple/gold (1913-1915); purple/old gold (1916-1918); purple/gold (1923-1935)
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. In IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hood lining patterns 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. Unfortunately, today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the Bureau intended to describe.
Kansas Wesleyan University inconsistently defined its college colors as either “royal purple” or “purple”, and as either “old gold” or “gold”. This imprecision is reflected in various hood lining descriptions for the university. Based on colors samples the university sent the IBAC, between 1910 and 1927 the university was assigned a hood lining that was “old gold above purple”, but by 1948 the Bureau had changed the description to “gold over purple”. In neither case did the IBAC describe the way the two colors were divided. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) did not help: it described Kansas Wesleyan’s hood lining as purple with a reversed gold chevron. Thinking that Sheard’s information described a new hood lining pattern Kansas Wesleyan had begun using, the Intercollegiate Bureau must have changed its record for the university, because an IBAC list from 1972 also described Kansas Wesleyan’s hood a purple with a reversed gold chevron.
Sheard’s description was probably erroneous. By 1927 the Intercollegiate Bureau had assigned both Harrisonburg State Teachers College (today James Madison University) and Kansas Wesleyan hood linings the IBAC described as “old gold above purple”. The colors were divided per chevron in Harrisonburg’s hood lining, so the colors in Kansas Wesleyan’s hood must have been divided per reversed chevron. In the 1960s Sheard probably misidentified this as a reversed chevron, and this inaccurate description made its way into the records of the IBAC.
Here the Intercollegiate Bureau’s original hood lining assignment for Kansas Wesleyan hood has been restored, but with the college’s official colors of old gold and royal purple.