Nyack College
New York
1882
Formerly “Nyack Missionary College”
Detailed historical information about the school colors of Nyack Missionary College is not available at this time, but the original colors of violet and white have been recently replaced by crimson and gray.
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. The standard chevron was between three and four inches in width, but to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, in a singular instance the Bureau also used a thin chevron, approximately 1½ inches in width.
Nyack Missionary College did not appear in early Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1927 or 1948, so the IBAC might not have assigned the college a hood lining until the late 1940s or 1950s. Lists compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) described Nyack’s hood lining as violet with a white chevron.
This may not have been completely accurate, as a 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list stated that the college’s hood lining was pansy-colored with a thin white chevron, 1½ inches in width. “Violet” and “pansy” are probably two different ways of describing the same medium shade of purple, and the IBAC halved the width of Nyack’s white chevron to avoid duplicating the hood lining assigned Amherst College in 1895 or 1896 (purple with a white chevron).
It was probably not an ideal solution to this problem, as a thin chevron is easily confused with a standard-width chevron to the untrained eye. So here Nyack’s single thin chevron has been doubled.