Lincoln University
Pennsylvania
1854
Detailed information about the history of the burnt orange and navy blue school colors of Lincoln University is not available at this time.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): orange/blue (1923-1935)
It is not certain when the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) assigned a hood lining to Lincoln University. An advertisement for the academic costume firm Cotrell & Leonard appears in the 1900 edition of the Lincoln University Class Book (yearbook). The advertisement does not explicitly state that Cotrell & Leonard has supplied academic costume for the university, but it seems likely. And since Cotrell & Leonard was the depository for the IBAC, the Bureau may have assigned Lincoln a hood lining pattern by that date. However, a photograph in the yearbook of the senior class in academic costume does not depict the students wearing hoods. According to the 22 July 1905 edition of The Westminster, although Lincoln University students wore academic costume at commencement, they apparently did so without hoods. This was common among schools that only conferred the bachelor’s degree because the added expense was prohibitive.
The first description of a hood for Lincoln University is in a chapter on American academic hoods in the 1923 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Colleges and Universities by Frank Haycraft, which included the text of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume and a long list of schools, each with a description of its hood lining. The chapter was written in a way that implied that this list was from the Intercollegiate Bureau. Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart interpreted by Haycraft to indicate the lining color of the school’s hood and the second color in the chart interpreted to indicate the chevron color of the school’s hood. That said, some of the schools in Haycraft’s book did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac or were listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the IBAC and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac.
Lincoln University was an example of an institution in Haycraft’s list that did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the university’s hood lining description cited by Haycraft might be from information he received from the IBAC around 1912. Haycraft described Lincoln’s hood lining as orange with a navy blue chevron.
The first definitive IBAC description of the university’s hood is from 1927; the hood is again described as orange with a navy blue chevron. Unfortunately, because the IBAC had imprecisely recorded the burnt orange of Lincoln as “orange”, on paper the university’s hood lining appeared to be a duplicate of the linings the IBAC had also assigned Gettysburg College and the University of Florida.
So in the late 1940s or 1950s, the Bureau seems to have attempted to rectify this problem by redesigning each institution’s hood. Lincoln’s hood was described in a 1972 IBAC list with interchanged colors: navy blue with an orange chevron. At first glance this appears to be a duplication of the hood lining the Bureau assigned to the University of Virginia in 1904 or 1905, but according to Kevin Sheard’s Academic Heraldry (1962), Lincoln’s hood used a burnt orange chevron, which would have been a different shade than the orange used by Virginia.
This late 1940s revision was unnecessary because Lincoln’s original c.1912 Intercollegiate Bureau hood lining assignment was unique — as long as the “orange” lining the Bureau recorded was understood to refer to the correct shade of burnt orange. Here that original hood lining design has been restored with a more accurate description of Lincoln’s lining and chevron colors.
