Rhodes College
Tennessee
1848
Formerly “Southwestern Presbyterian University”
Detailed information about the school colors of Southwestern Presbyterian University is not currently available. Our College Colors (1949) says that cardinal and black were selected in 1880 but this is inconsistent with information from the World Almanac, below.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): white/light blue (1896); white/blue (1897); red/gray (1900); red/black (1902-1918); cardinal/black (1923-1935)
Cotrell & Leonard was a 19th century academic costume manufacturing firm that supplied caps, gowns, and hoods to most of the prestigious colleges and universities in the United States. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners in this firm, was director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization founded in 1887 to compile data on European and American academic costume. Leonard was also a consultant to the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume, which on 16 May 1895 approved a voluntary system of academic costume that quickly became the standard followed by most American colleges and universities.
Two years before the Intercollegiate Code was created, Leonard wrote an article called “The Cap and Gown in America” for the December 1893 issue of The University Magazine. In this article, Leonard described various types of caps and gown currently used by American colleges and universities and encouraged more schools to adopt academic costume. He also mentioned several institutions that used cap and gown; these were no doubt clients of the Cotrell & Leonard firm where he worked. So when the 1895 Intercollegiate Code was authorized and the Intercollegiate Bureau began assigning hood lining patterns for each college or university that adopted the Code, clients of Cotrell & Leonard would probably have been some of the first to have had hood lining patterns assigned to them.
Southwestern Presbyterian University was mentioned in “The Cap and Gown in America” as having adopted academic costume, so the IBAC is likely to have assigned a hood lining pattern to the university in 1895 or soon after. According to the World Almanac, Southwestern’s colors at this point were blue (or light blue) and white. Southwestern’s colors changed by 1902 at the latest, but the arrangement of those new colors in the lining of its hood was not described until a 1927 Intercollegiate Bureau list that said the university’s hood lining was “cardinal above black”, a phrase the Bureau used to describe hood lining colors heraldically divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. The per chevron division was more common.
The IBAC had identically described the hood lining of University of Georgia (“cardinal above black”) by 1897 or 1898; Georgia used a color division per chevron. So the Intercollegiate Bureau may have been describing Southwestern’s hood lining as being cardinal above black, divided per reversed chevron.
One should note that Southwestern’s seal includes a black shield with a cardinal saltire. For this reason, a black lining with a cardinal saltire might be a preferable heraldic pattern for the university’s academic hood. Augusta University in Georgia is currently the only college or university in the US that uses a hood lining with a saltire pattern.