Simmons College
Massachusetts
1899
The first IBAC description of the college’s hood lining was in a 1918 list, where it was stated to be dark blue with a gold chevron. By 1927, the Bureau had changed its description of the blue shade of Simmons’s hood lining to “Wellesley blue” (a medium to dark shade of blue), probably as a way to distinguish the hood of Simmons from the hoods of other schools that had also been assigned dark blue hood linings with gold chevrons.
In practice, this type of hood lining duplication was common. As the number of IBAC-registered schools increased during the early 1900s, and as the number of IBAC-registered schools with the same college colors increased, the Bureau found it increasingly difficult to avoid duplicating the hoods they assigned to these colleges and universities that used the same colors. To solve this problem, the Intercollegiate Bureau used distinctive heraldic divisions for some schools, but also began to employ semantic slights-of-hand to disguise the fact that schools were being assigned hoods that were, practically speaking, identical.
For instance, in the 1918 IBAC list discussed above there are no less than three schools that were assigned identical dark blue and gold hood linings by the IBAC: Goucher College (dark blue with a gold yellow chevron), the University of Pittsburgh (navy blue with a gold yellow chevron), and Simmons College (dark blue with a gold chevron). Although each IBAC description is differently worded, the hoods are essentially the same design: a dark blue lining with a gold chevron.
A faculty committee at Simmons College selected blue and gold as the school colors in 1904, stipulating the shade of blue to be “Yale blue” (dark blue).
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gold (1906-1935)
Simmons College was founded in 1899 but did not formally open until 9 October 1902. The first commencement at Simmons was held on 13 June 1906, and academic hoods may have been used by graduating seniors. If not, hoods representing Simmons certainly would have been used by members of the Corporation of the college the first time they wore academic costume (at the June 1912 commencement, according to The Simmons Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 4). So the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) must have assigned a hood lining design to Simmons at some point between 1906 and 1912.
These duplications have been avoided here by using the original Intercollegiate Bureau hood assignment for each school, and if necessary, assigning a unique heraldic division of the colors in each school’s hood lining. There is historical precedent for this because double chevrons, triple chevrons, colors divided parti-per chevron, and horizontal bars (what the Bureau called “zones”) were already being used by the IBAC in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but today it is not known why the IBAC did not use these and other heraldic divisions more often.
Because the original hood linings of Goucher and Pittsburgh were dark blue and old gold, the original dark blue and gold hood lining the IBAC assigned to Simmons College can be retained without duplication.