University of Evansville
Indiana
1854
Formerly “Moores Hill College”
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): purple/white (1917-1935)
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but Bureau director Gardner Cotrell 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 occasionally used was the “reversed chevron”. Here the standard chevron of between three and four inches in width was inverted so that the chevron pointed upwards.
Purple and white were the colors of Moores Hill College, but it is not known how or when they were chosen. The colors were retained when Moores Hill became Evansville College in 1919.
The IBAC assigned Moores Hill College a hood lining that was purple with a white “reversed chevron” at some point between 1895 and 1919. This assignment was recorded in Intercollegiate Bureau lists in 1927, 1948, and 1972. When Moores Hill College moved from Moores Hill, Indiana to Evansville, Indiana and became Evansville College, the IBAC – not realizing that the two schools were one and the same – assigned Evansville a new hood lining pattern, probably in the 1930s. Intercollegiate Bureau lists from 1948 and 1972 described Evansville’s hood lining as purple with two white chevrons. A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Dress and Insignia of the World (1970) included an identical description of the college’s hood lining.
Unfortunately, this was a duplication of the hood lining pattern the Bureau had already assigned to the Pennsylvania College for Women in the early 1900s.
Here the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume’s original (and unique) hood lining assignment for Moores Hill College has been restored.