The authors of the 1895 Code were working from a pedagogical model that dated to the medieval period, when universities had an undergraduate collegium called either the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of Philosophy, where the seven liberal arts were taught: the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). It is from this pedagogical approach that the modern concept of a “liberal arts education” within a “College of Arts and Sciences” evolved. There were also four higher (graduate) Faculties of Canon Law, Civil Law, Medicine, and Theology. Faculties of Music were later added, but not much is known about this except that the Bachelor of Music and Doctor of Music degrees began to be conferred at Oxford University in the early 1500s.

Although medieval scholastics had a concept of seven “mechanical arts” that balanced the seven “liberal arts”, vocational education did not begin to emerge from the family and the guilds until the 19^th century. In the United States, land grant colleges and universities were established for technical and professional training in agriculture, engineering, public school teaching, and other vocations. The authors of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code did not provide Faculty colors for these mechanical arts, but entrusted the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume with the responsibility of authorizing new Faculty colors as needed.

Most of the 14 new Faculty colors approved by the Intercollegiate Bureau between 1898 and 1918 were for vocational degrees. Unfortunately, rather than subsume these vocational degrees into a few general Faculty color categories based on the name of the School or College responsible for the requirements of those degrees, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume fell into the habit of assigning a single color to each of the professional degree titles. This led to a rapid expansion of the Intercollegiate Code’s Faculty color list, and increased difficulty distinguishing between Faculty colors of similar hue. The “subject color” approach of the American Council on Education’s 1960 Academic Costume Code only exacerbated this problem. That there are not enough easily-distinguishable colors to assign to every academic major or discipline under that Code is an observation so obvious that we should not be surprised that the American Council on Education did not even try to do so.

Today, the Intercollegiate Registry of Academic Costume recommends a return to the Faculty color strategy of the original 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, whereby the nomenclature of the degree title as it appears on one’s diploma is used to determine the Faculty color, and the Faculty color categories are associated with large pedagogical divisions (collegium) of the university. So to create a list of Faculty colors, the Registry has noted the divisions of contemporary “Faculties” (that is, “Schools” and “Colleges”) at the current and former institutions in the Association of American Universities, a consortium of research universities formed in 1900. The Intercollegiate Registry has assigned Faculty colors to the 27 most common Schools or Colleges within those institutions in the Association, and an additional Faculty color to be used for all honorary (honoris causa) degrees. Most of these colors have been carried over from Faculty colors historically assigned by the Intercollegiate Bureau, especially if the color is easily distinguishable from the others and has a symbolic association with the academic Faculty it represents.