Ohio Wesleyan University
Ohio
1842
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): scarlet/jet (1895); red/black (1896); crimson/jet (1897); black/scarlet (1900); red/black (1902-1913); scarlet/jet (1914); red/black (1915-1918); scarlet/jet (1923-1931); red/black (1934-1935)
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) probably assigned Ohio Wesleyan University a black hood lining with a cardinal chevron between 1895 and 1898, but it was first officially cited with this arrangement of its colors in a 1927 IBAC list.
For reasons that are not known, in the late 1940s or 1950s the IBAC interchanged the colors in Ohio Wesleyan’s hood lining. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the university’s hood lining as red with a black chevron, which was also how it was described in an IBAC list from 1969. Since this was a duplication of the hood Wesleyan University had adopted in 1900, by 1972 the IBAC had wisely reverted to Ohio Wesleyan’s original color arrangement from the late 1890s.
In 1890, Ohio Wesleyan students voted to adopt cardinal and black as their school colors, replacing pearl and gold. However, contemporary materials variously described Ohio Wesleyan’s cardinal as red, crimson, or scarlet, and often described the school’s black as “jet”.
