Linfield College
Oregon
1858
Formerly “McMinnville College”
McMinnville College students chose cardinal and purple to be their college colors around 1901. Red symbolized courage and purple symbolized strength. The previous colors were salmon pink and Nile green, which symbolized the pink salmon and green water of the Columbia River that flows through the green forests of Oregon, but these colors were replaced because they were easily soiled when used for athletic uniforms.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): cardinal/purple (1917-1935)
Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927, 1948, and 1972 described McMinnville College as having used a hood lined cardinal with a purple chevron. It is not known whether this was a hood lining pattern that had been officially assigned by the IBAC or merely a record of the college’s school colors applied to a hypothetical hood lining arrangement, but either way it was a unique hood lining not used by any other college or university at the time.
After McMinnville became Linfield College in 1922, the Intercollegiate Bureau began citing both schools in their 1948 and 1972 lists. Evidently the Bureau didn’t realize that both names were for the same college. To avoid what they thought would have been a duplication of McMinnville’s hood, the IBAC interchanged the colors of the “new” school that had the same cardinal and purple colors as McMinnville, assigning Linfield a hood lining that was purple with a cardinal chevron. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Linfield College’s hood lining the same way.
This revision of the college’s hood was unnecessary, so here the original pre-1922 Intercollegiate Bureau lining assignment for McMinnville College has been retained.