Sarah Lawrence College
New York
1926
Sarah Lawrence College appeared in a 1948 IBAC list with a blank hood lining assignment, which means either the college was not using a hood, or that the Bureau was in the process of assigning a hood lining pattern when the list went to press. By 1962, when Kevin Sheard wrote Academic Heraldry in America, Sarah Lawrence was using a hood that was lined emerald green with a white “reversed chevron”, probably to avoid duplicating the hood linings already assigned to Bethany College in West Virginia or North Texas State College (today the University of North Texas). This citation was unchanged in Sheard’s Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970). However, an IBAC list from 1972 erroneously described the hood lining as emerald with a (standard) white chevron.
Detailed historical information about the emerald green and white school colors of Sarah Lawrence College is not available at this time.
To avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) used different types of heraldic patterns to divide the two or more colors in an academic hood. One of the heraldic divisions the Bureau occasionally employed was a “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.
