United States Naval Postgraduate School
California
1909
The US Naval Postgraduate School adopted the same navy blue and old gold colors as the US Naval Academy. These traditional colors of the US Navy were carried over from the Academy when the Postgraduate School was founded in 1909. Like many colleges and universities using old gold in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the color would be redefined as a brighter shade of gold later in the 20th century.
The hood lining design of the US Naval Postgraduate School was not cited in academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927 or 1948, but a 1972 IBAC list described the college as having a hood lined dark blue with a “reversed” gold chevron. A reversed chevron is an inverted chevron with the point up. A list that had been compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) had also described the college’s hood lining the same way.
Both sources inaccurately describe the school’s old gold as “gold”, which unfortunately duplicates the dark blue and gold hood lining already assigned to Marquette University (Yale blue with a reversed gold chevron). So to resolve these problems, the US Naval Postgraduate School has been reassigned a new hood lining with the correct shade of gold and a “per pale” heraldic pattern that echoes the heraldry of the college’s coat of arms.