South Dakota State University
South Dakota
1881
Formerly “South Dakota State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts”
It is not known when the students at South Dakota State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts selected yellow and blue as their school colors, but the school’s alma mater, written in 1908, refers to the yellow and blue college colors as well as the “golden gleam of the cornfield and the flax of azure blue”. Golden yellow and azure blue were also the official colors of the South Dakota flag adopted in 1909, which were generically defined in the official state regulations as “gold” and “blue”. South Dakota State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts used the same shades of golden yellow and azure blue, but over the years more contrasting shades of bright yellow and dark blue began to predominate and are today the official colors of South Dakota State University.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): yellow/blue (1915-1935)
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 frequently employed was a “double chevron”. The typical width of a normal chevron was between three and four inches, but the double chevron pattern used two chevrons of about 1½ inches in width placed approximately two inches apart so that the color of the hood lining showed between them.
Probably to avoid duplicating the light blue and maize hood lining already assigned to St. Clara College in Wisconsin, (today Dominican University in Illinois), the IBAC assigned South Dakota College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts a hood lining that was light blue (not azure blue) with two maize chevrons no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. The IBAC used “maize” to describe a golden yellow (or orangish-yellow) shade. The same citation appeared in IBAC lists from 1948 and 1972, but a 1969 IBAC list simplified the description of the two chevrons as “yellow”. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) also said the college’s hood lining was light blue with two yellow chevrons. Here a more accurate shade of azure blue has been substituted for the Bureau’s light blue, still with two golden yellow (or “maize”) chevrons.