Lycoming College
Pennsylvania
1812
Formerly “Williamsport Dickinson Seminary”
The original colors of Williamsport Dickinson Seminary were gold and white, which had been chosen after a successful football season in 1902, but in October 1947 the school’s cheerleaders campaigned to have the school colors changed to either blue and gold, gold and silver, or maroon and white. When put to a vote, the students chose blue and gold, with the shade of blue understood to be a dark blue. A year later “Dickinson Seminary and Junior College” became a four-year institution named “Lycoming College”. According to the new college’s Alma Mater (written a decade later), the blue symbolized honor and the gold symbolized valor.
At some point in the early 1900s the IBAC received incorrect information about the gold and white school colors of “Dickinson Seminary” and assigned the college a gold hood lining with two black chevrons. This error appeared in IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972.
The 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list also had a second, updated citation – this one for “Lycoming College” – that said the institution’s hood lining was blue with a gold chevron, a description first found in a hood list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962). Unfortunately these two descriptions did not accurately describe the dark shade of Lycoming’s blue, which means the post-1948 IBAC pattern for Lycoming was either a duplication of the hood lining the Bureau had assigned Vincennes University (blue with a gold chevron) between 1894 and 1912 or a duplication of the hood lining the Bureau had assigned Simmons College (dark blue with a gold chevron) between 1906 and 1912.
To avoid this problem, the original Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume hood lining assignment for Dickinson Seminary has been applied to Lycoming College, but with corrected lining colors of gold with two (dark) blue chevrons instead of black.
