University of Charleston
West Virginia
1888
Formerly “Morris Harvey College”
On 16 May 1895 the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of caps, gowns, and hoods for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The commissioners intended for every college and university to use their school colors in the lining of their academic hood, which would enable an observer to “read” the hood and thereby identify the alma mater of the hood’s owner. The commissioners were initially stymied by the fact that many colleges and universities use the same school colors until Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and an advisor to the Commission, suggested that various heraldic divisions of the colors might be employed to create distinctive hood lining patterns that could be individually assigned to each school that chose to follow the Intercollegiate Code.
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the IBAC employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Leonard also used other heraldic devices to avoid assigning duplicate hood linings to colleges and universities that used the same school colors. By 1918 one of the other heraldic divisions the IBAC used was the “parti per reversed chevron”. This pattern was a variation of the “parti per chevron” pattern introduced in 1895, except that the division between the hood lining’s upper and lower colors followed the shape of an inverted chevron (a chevron with its point up).
Information about the history of the maroon and old gold school colors of Morris Harvey College is not available at this time.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): red/gold (1934-1935)
Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods were vaguely described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]” which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe.
Since the University of Minnesota had already been assigned a hood lined old gold with a maroon chevron in 1897 or 1897, the IBAC assigned Morris Harvey College a hood lined “old gold above maroon” no later than 1927, according to an IBAC list from that period. The IBAC described the hood lining of Eureka College in an identical manner, but as Eureka appears to have been assigned this pattern first, here the IBAC description of Morris Harvey’s hood as “old gold above maroon” has been interpreted to describe a division of the colors per reversed chevron.