Mount Mary University
Wisconsin
1913
Formerly “Saint Mary’s College”
In 1915, two years after St. Mary’s College was founded, the administration selected blue and white as the school’s colors. The shade of blue was pale, because sky blue and white are the colors traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (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.
The IBAC assigned St. Mary’s College a hood lined “white above light blue” according to a 1927 list. A 1948 citation from the Intercollegiate Bureau said that the lower color was “blue”, not light blue, which suggests the college’s blue had darkened to a medium blue or “true blue” shade. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described Mount Mary University’s hood lining as blue with a white chevron, and this erroneous description also made it into an IBAC list from 1972. Here the original (and most accurate) Intercollegiate Bureau hood lining design and colors have been retained.