Texas College
Texas
1894
Was named “Phillips University” between 1909 and 1912
The purple and old gold school colors of Texas College were selected around 1895 by a committee of students and faculty. The committee chose these colors because old gold symbolizes purity and value, and purple symbolizes royalty and power. The shade of purple was dark, like a royal purple.
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 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.
“Phillips University” (not Texas College) was listed in IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972 as having a hood lined purple with a gold chevron, but this appears to be nothing more than a c.1909–1912 record of the college’s colors applied to a generic hood lining.
After receiving purple and old gold color samples from Texas College in the late 1940s or 1950s, the IBAC must have officially assigned the school a hood lining at that time. To avoid duplicating the hood lining already used by Knox College, the IBAC assigned Texas College a “purple” (not dark purple) hood lining with an inverted old gold chevron. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining pattern as purple with a reversed “gold” (not old gold) chevron, but an IBAC list from 1972 more accurately cited the lining as purple with a reversed old gold chevron. (By this point the Bureau rarely distinguished between dark purple and purple).
This 1972 list actually included two citations for the college: one as Phillips University (purple with a gold chevron) and another as Texas College (purple with a reversed old gold chevron).