Notre Dame College

Ohio

1922

official hood lining pattern
royal blue
gold

Students at Notre Dame College in Ohio selected royal blue and gold as their school colors in 1922 when the school was founded. Historically, “royal blue” typically described a dark shade of blue with a purple tint, but today the college is using a lighter and brighter shade of royal blue.

The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Bureau president Gardner Cotrell Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. Beginning in 1895, one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC used was what they called “[color] and [color]”, most likely referring to a “parti per pale” division whereby the two colors were divided vertically in the lining of the hood with the description being understood as “[left side] and [right side]” of the hood lining.

For example, the Intercollegiate Bureau assigned Notre Dame College a hood lining with a per pale division of its colors between 1922 and 1927, because an IBAC list from that period described the college’s hood as “azure blue and gold”. A 1948 IBAC list repeated this description. Unfortunately, the IBAC’s color information for the college was erroneous: the correct school colors for Notre Dame College were royal blue and gold, not azure blue and gold.

Perhaps this is why the IBAC later revised Notre Dame College’s per pale division to a division using a normal chevron. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) said that the college was using a hood lining that was royal blue with a gold chevron, and an IBAC list from 1972 described it even more generically as blue with a gold chevron. Because Ursuline College had already been assigned a royal blue hood lining with a gold chevron, here the original and unique 1920s IBAC hood lining assignment for Notre Dame College has been restored, but with the school’s traditional shade of royal blue.

A photograph from a c.1905 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue that has been altered to illustrate a bachelor's hood lined with two colors divided per pale.