University of Arkansas system
Each institution in the system uses different athletic colors but the same academic hood lining pattern from the original University of Arkansas:
University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
Arkansas
1871
The Cotrell & Leonard academic costume firm was the depository for the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), and the names of both are mentioned in the same advertisements from the late 1890s and early 1900s. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners of Cotrell & Leonard, was also the Director of the IBAC, so it seems likely that when a school ordered academic caps, gowns, and hoods from Cotrell & Leonard, the hood lining colors and heraldic pattern used for the order would be registered with the Bureau. Hood registration dates for schools, therefore, can be estimated as roughly contemporaneous with the first appearance of that school in a Cotrell & Leonard/Intercollegiate Bureau advertisement.
An advertisement of this sort featuring the University of Arkansas first appeared in The 1896 Comet yearbook of Vanderbilt University, and a reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) mentioned the University of Arkansas as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. These citations indicate an IBAC registration in 1895 or 1896, but neither one described the hood pattern assigned by the Bureau.
The first definitive Intercollegiate Bureau list with this information was published in 1927, where Arkansas’s hood lining was described as cardinal with a white “zone”. “Zone” is how the IBAC described a heraldic bar. The Bureau had probably assigned Arkansas a horizontal bar instead of a chevron to avoid confusion with the hood lining assigned to Dickinson College (cardinal with a white chevron) or Radcliffe College (crimson with a white chevron — today part of Harvard University). Arkansas’s hood was consistently described as cardinal with a white zone (bar) in all subsequent IBAC lists until 1969, when the university was said to be using a hood that was lined cardinal with a white chevron. This must have been an error, because two years later a 1972 IBAC list reverted to the original cardinal hood lining with a white bar.
Students at the University of Arkansas selected cardinal as their school color in 1893. White was often added as an accent color, so by the 1920s it was unofficially considered to be the second school color.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): cardinal (1900-1931); cardinal/white (1934-1935)
