Northwestern University
Illinois
1851
To cheer the football team at an 1879 game, Northwestern University students wore light blue in addition to the color of each individual’s class (senior, junior, sophomore, or freshman). This festive display of school spirit led to the formation of a student committee that year to choose a school color or colors for the entire university. The student committee selected black and gold. The Northwestern alumni association was afraid that these school colors too closely resembled those of Princeton (black and orange), so they replaced black with royal purple in late 1879.
Royal purple and gold were the official colors of Northwestern University for thirteen years. Wanting to imitate the prestigious east coast universities with one school color like Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, in 1892 the administration appointed a committee to reduce Northwestern’s school colors to just one. After two years of deliberation, this committee selected royal purple in 1894. This was identical to the singular school color used by one of the prestigious east coast schools Northwestern was trying to imitate: Williams College.
Old traditions die hard, so royal purple and gold continued to be unofficially used at Northwestern. Purple and white was also a popular combination of colors, and are mentioned in the school’s alma mater (1907). Whether it was used alone, with gold, or with white, Northwestern’s typical shade of purple was dark (“royal purple”).
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): purple/gold (1895); royal purple (1896-1902); purple/old gold (1904); royal purple (1906-1911); purple (1913-1914); royal purple (1915-1916): red/white (1917-1918); royal purple (1923-1931); purple (1934-1935)
According to Northwestern University’s Alumni Record of the College of Liberal Arts (1903), the “seniors [inaugurated] the custom of wearing cap and gown” in June 1891, four years before the creation of the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume. However, the Alumni Record for June 1895 stated that the “custom of wearing cap and gown [was] inaugurated” by the class of 1895. These two inauguration dates seem contradictory, but the 1895 notation most likely refers to the adoption of academic costume in the new pattern authorized by the Intercollegiate Code that year.
A formal hood assignment by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) may have occurred as early as 1895 or 1896 because a reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) mentioned Northwestern as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. Northwestern was also one of about two-dozen elite graduate institutions listed in both the 1896-1897 and 1897-1898 editions of Graduate Courses: A Handbook for Graduate Students. So it is likely that the university would have been using masters and doctoral hoods for their graduates by that point.
The first definitive Intercollegiate Bureau description of Northwestern’s hood lining was not published until a 1918 Encyclopedia Americana article on academic costume written by Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the IBAC. Leonard stated that the university had been assigned a hood lining that was purple (not royal purple) with a gold yellow (bright gold) chevron. By the time the Bureau had assigned a hood to Northwestern, the university was no longer using gold as its second color, but a single color hood lining in royal purple had already been assigned to Williams College. Also, the IBAC had already assigned a hood lined purple with a white chevron to Amherst College. So the Bureau probably added a chevron in the former bright gold color of Northwestern as a way of distinguishing Northwestern’s hood from the hoods of these other two schools.
By 1927 the Intercollegiate Bureau had revised the description of the chevron from gold yellow to gold, a description that was unchanged until 1972, when an IBAC list described Northwestern’s hood lining as “purple and gold”. This was typically the Bureau’s description for a hood lining with colors divided per pale, and was probably an erroneous description.
One should note that by 1927 the IBAC rarely used “royal purple” in its new hood lining assignments, and had changed almost all of the earlier “royal purple” hood descriptions to “purple”. So today it is difficult to know if a particular college or university like Northwestern had been originally assigned a hood lining with a dark or medium shade of purple. Here the university’s traditional shade of royal purple has been used.
