Tufts University
Massachusetts
1852
Students at Tufts University selected “seal brown” and “pearl white” as their school colors in 1876, replacing the single color of “cherry”. Later that same year the students voted to replace pearl white with royal blue. In the 19th and early 20th centuries “royal blue” typically described a dark purplish-blue, but Tufts students meant it to indicate a light blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): brown/blue (1895-1931); seal brown/royal blue (1934-1935)
Tufts University was a client of Cotrell & Leonard before the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume was created in 1895, according to “The Cap and Gown in America”, an article written in May 1893 for The University Magazine by Gardner Cotrell Leonard, a partner in the Cotrell & Leonard firm and the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Two years later, the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume came into force, which stipulated that an academic hood lining would now display the colors of the institution that conferred the degree. Later in 1895, Tufts appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the December edition of the Yale Literary Magazine, then in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1896 Illio yearbook of the University of Illinois, and then in a newspaper article in the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) about commencement exercises at the University of Chicago that mentioned Tufts as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume.
Since Cotrell & Leonard was the depository of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume, it is safe to assume that Tufts was assigned a hood lining design at some point in 1895 or 1896. None of these references described the hood design assigned to the university during this period. However, in an IBAC list in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, Tuft’s hood lining was said to be brown with a blue chevron. This basic heraldic pattern remained the same for the university’s hood lining, but the Intercollegiate Bureau modified the shades of brown or blue over the years. By 1918 the IBAC more accurately described Tuft’s hood lining as “brown” (how the Bureau typically described dark brown) with a light blue chevron, but by 1927 as the (dark) brown lining had become “light brown” with a light blue chevron. A 1969 IBAC list stated that the hood lining was dark brown and blue.
Tufts University’s traditional color shades of dark brown and light blue have been used in this restoration.