Southwestern University
Texas
1840
The first reference to a hood assignment for Southwestern University by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) was in a 1927 list, where the Bureau described the hood lining as canary yellow with a black chevron.
At some point in the 1950s, long after the university had officially changed its school colors, the IBAC revised Southwestern’s hood lining to the new university colors of gold and black. To avoid duplicating the hood lining already assigned to Vanderbilt University (gold with black chevron), the IBAC redefined Southwestern’s lining as gold above black, which is how the Bureau described a heraldic division per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar.
Non-IBAC sources from 1962 and 1970 stated that the lining was old gold above black, divided per chevron. “Old gold” – an orangeish shade of gold – is perhaps a better description of the shade of both the (former) canary yellow and (current) gold colors of the university.
Here the original IBAC assignment has been used.
The faculty of Southwestern University chose canary yellow and black as the school colors in 1898. Gold and black were also used, so to avoid confusion over the term “canary yellow” and to brighten the university’s color scheme, in 1930 the colors were officially changed to gold and black. As canary yellow is a golden yellow shade, in heraldic terms this change was primarily semantic.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): yellow/black (1902-1912); lemon/black (1913-1914); black/gold (1915-1922); canary/black (1923-1935)
