Samford University

Alabama

1841

Formerly “Howard College”

official hood lining pattern
A 1936 "dink" or "beanie" cap from Howard College. The crimson wool has aged to an orange color.

After the death of Gardner Cotrell Leonard in 1921, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) gradually abdicated the responsibilities it had been given by the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume in 1895. By the 1960s the Bureau had yielded its authority to approve new Faculty colors to the American Council on Education, and was no longer assigning individual hood lining patterns to every school that applied for one.

Perhaps as early as the 1930s the IBAC appears to have made the decision to assign unique hood lining patterns only to colleges or universities that conferred terminal degrees (doctoral degrees and the Master of Fine Arts degree) because these hoods would be worn by collegiate faculty on a regular basis. For institutions that offered only bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the Bureau permitted the use of a two-color “generic” hood lining pattern featuring a single chevron. Since these hoods were considered “souvenirs” of the graduates’ alma mater and would not normally have been worn after commencement, it was of no concern that the generic pattern might duplicate the officially registered hood lining pattern of a school that had already been assigned that pattern in the late 1890s or early 1900s.

A policy of this sort would explain why hood lining lists from the Intercollegiate Bureau cited so many duplicate hood lining patterns. Sometimes a duplicate pattern was nothing more than a record of the school colors of an institution that had never contacted the IBAC, applied to a generic hood lining pattern; other times the duplicate pattern was a generic hood lining the Bureau permitted to be used by a school that only offered bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Today many of these colleges and universities now confer terminal graduate degrees. Unfortunately most are still using their generic hood lining pattern that duplicates the lining pattern the Bureau officially assigned to another institution a century ago.

crimson
blue

Detailed historical information about the crimson and blue school colors of Howard College is not available at this time, but the college’s official shade of blue is dark, like a navy blue or a Yale blue.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): crimson/blue (1917-1935)

A photograph from a c.1905 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue that has been altered to illustrate a doctoral hood with a lining pattern that uses three chevrons.

Samford University is one example. Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927, 1948, and 1972 described Howard College as having a hood lined crimson with a Yale blue chevron, which was indistinguishable from the hood lining the Bureau had assigned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1895.

Howard College began conferring doctoral degrees in 1961 but the Intercollegiate Bureau never revised the institution’s hood lining pattern, even after it became “Samford University” in 1965. So to avoid unnecessary confusion with Pennsylvania’s academic hood, here Samford has been reassigned a lining pattern that is crimson with three dark blue chevrons to symbolize the university’s motto: “For God, For Learning, For Eternity”.