University of Kansas
Kansas
1865
The University of Kansas adopted crimson and blue as its school colors in 1890, replacing the maize (or “corn yellow”) and sky blue colors that the university had been using since the early 1870s. This change occurred when the athletic teams at Kansas started using crimson and “deep blue” (dark blue) because these were the colors of Harvard and Yale, and because maize and azure blue were also the colors of the University of Michigan, one of Kansas’s athletic rivals. But officially the academic colors of the Unversity of Kansas remained maize and sky blue into the 1950s.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): crimson (1895-1897); crimson/blue (1900-1908); crimson/dark blue (1909-1911); crimson/blue (1912-1935)
According to information from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) recorded in the 1897 Living Church Quarterly (published in December 1896), the IBAC registered the University of Kansas as having the hood lining colors of crimson and dark blue in 1896, but the heraldic pattern used to separate these colors was not described in the Quarterly. When a school had two colors, the Intercollegiate Bureau tended to use a chevron as the standard way to divide those colors in the lining of a hood, and later interpretations of these early school color lists often assumed that the first color referred to the hood lining and the second color referred to the chevron.
But if this had been the case for the University of Kansas colors in the Living Church Quarterly list, a duplication of the hood already assigned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1895 would have occurred. So the IBAC interchanged the colors in Kansas’s hood and assigned the university a dark blue lining with a crimson chevron.
The first definitive description of the hood lining of the University of Kansas was in a 1918 Intercollegiate Bureau list, where it was said to be lined dark blue with a “red” chevron. An IBAC list from 1927 modified the shade descriptions, stating that the hood had a “navy blue” lining with a “cardinal” chevron. But by the late 1960s, Intercollegiate Bureau lists described Kansas’s hood with interchanged colors and with different shades of medium red: a 1969 IBAC list described the hood as having a cardinal lining with a chevron of “Yale blue” (which was how the Bureau described a dark shade of blue), and an IBAC list from 1972 stated that the hood lining was crimson with a Yale blue chevron. Both of these hoods would have been easily confused with the hood of the University of Pennsylvania.
Why the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume changed Kansas’s hood pattern to that resembling Pennsylvania’s is unknown and unfortunate. So the original IBAC assignment has been retained here.